If you're new to Resource Depletion thinking, one place to start is
The Oil Drum, for an overview
of Peak Oil, the iconic example of Resource Depletion.
The basic premise of Peak Oil is that humankind has already burned up
most of the easy-to-acquire oil and natural gas in the world -- the stuff
that we can easily pump right out of the ground. Past peak, everything else costs
more energy to get out than it did before, causing a spiral in costs
and availability. The question is when
we hit that tipping point. When we hit the peak (and many say that
happened in 2006), then the cost of energy begins to inevitably rise
dramatically and rapidly. For modern society, when oil hits $120/barrel
to $200/barrel (or $5-$15/gallon), then all sorts of things begin to go awry.
The same premise can be
applied to nearly all our fundamental resources. Aquifirs have been
drained for agricultural irrigation. Obvious rivers have been already been dammed.
The easiest-to-get copper, magnesium,
iron, and other minerals vital for modern life has already been harvested
-- when energy was cheap! Natural gas is getting harder to find. Gold, platinum, silver, and titanium are
all oversubscribed.
Energy-intensive fertilization and monocrops
have made even most topsoil a depleted resource, unable to grow much
without pumping energy-expensive fertilizer upon it.
We are hypothesizing a 20% per year increase in
energy and material costs over the next ten years (note: oil was $50 a
barrel two years ago, and has recently exceeded $100), and for most
resource commodities because of it:
- Increased transportation costs for everything
starts creating
a fundamental worldwide recession/depression -- putting the current "just in
time" delivery and distribution systems, and globalism in general, in
jeopardy
- Commuting costs, suddenly dramatically higher, start eating into
the viability of suburbia (see The Long Emergency, by
James Howard Kunstler), deeply
affecting home values in those areas, creating even more economic
strife
- Alternative energy sources start being economically competitive (though still
expensive) -- solar, wind, water, coal, nuclear -- but can't ramp up
quickly enough to prevent the worldwide depression
- Fundamental products like food (meat, produce, even flour) rise in
price as fertilizer, mechanized production, and transportation costs
rise
- Airfare and air transport become much more expensive
- High-energy, high-fertilizer, transport-heavy agriculture becomes increasingly untenable
- Trains will likely become cost-effective again (helping large
urban areas more than remote areas)
- Internet use -- for telecommuting, entertainment, delivery
efficiencies, coordination of commuting, shopping, and more --
becomes a lifeline, not just a distraction
- The "consumer society" grinds slowly to a halt, causing dramatic disruption
in China and much of the "outsourced manufacturing" world
- The "war on terrorism" is ratcheted up to
a "war on Arab terrorism," the OPEC nations being
an easy target of blame for "holding our energy future for ransom."
- Walking-distance centralization (walk to grocery stores, etc.)
succeeds over driving-distance centralization (Wal-Mart, malls, etc.)
- Low-energy hand crafts, community gardens, bicycles, community cooperation,
and friend networks rise in value and practical utility
- Steady-state models, rather than constant-growth models, for
economic sustainability become much more interesting to economists
and citizens.
This Scenario promises a slow-motion, economically grinding spiral
down into a worldwide,
desperate depression. Even those lucky few with farms and fields will suffer,
though perhaps not as dramatically as those in mostly urban
landscapes.
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| Recent Resource Depletion News |
Starvation a likely outcome of climate change in Africa
The global community is failing to meet the threat of climate change, says the chairman of the international body researching and tracking the climate change phenomena, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
Addressing the National Climate Change Summit here on a video clip, Pachauri, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said things had gone backwards since the first global commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 16 years ago.
"Despite that commitment, between 1970 and 2004 emissions rose 70 per cent, and carbon dioxide alone rose 80 percent." ... Focusing on Africa, Pachauri said the prediction for some countries was that, as early as 2020, agricultural yield would drop by up to 50 percent.
"In most cases, these are countries where people are already suffering from malnutrition, so this will exacerbate that suffering."
Also by 2020, largely as a result of climate change, it is expected that between 75 million and 250 million people across the continent will be suffering from "water stress" -- a shortage of drinkable water.
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China plans 59 reservoirs to collect meltwater from its shrinking glaciers
China is planning to build 59 reservoirs to collect water from its shrinking glaciers as the cost of climate change hits home in the world's most populous country.
The far western province of Xinjiang, home to many of the planet's highest peaks and widest ice fields, will carry out the 10-year engineering project, which aims to catch and store glacier run-off that might otherwise trickle away into the desert.
Behind the measure is a concern that millions of people in the region will run out of water once the glaciers in the Tian, Kunlun and Altai mountains disappear.
Anxiety has risen along with temperatures that are rapidly diminishing the ice fields. The 3,800-metre Urumqi No1 glacier, the first to be measured in China, has lost more than 20 percent of its volume since 1962, according to the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute (Careeri) in Lanzhou.
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Large fish going hungry as supplies of smaller species dwindle: report
HALIFAX, N.S. -- Dolphins, sharks and other large marine species around the world are going hungry as they seek out dwindling supplies of the small, overlooked species they feed on, according to a new study that says overfishing is draining their food sources.
In a report released Monday, scientists with the international conservation group Oceana said they found several species were emaciated, reproducing slowly and declining in numbers in part because their food sources are being fished out.
"This is the first time that we're seeing a worldwide trend that more and more large animals are going hungry," Margot Stiles, a marine biologist at Oceana and the author of the report, said from Washington, D.C.
"It's definitely starting to be a pattern."
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American taste for soft toilet paper 'worse than driving Hummers'
The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country's love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public's insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.
"This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous," said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council.... More than 98 percent of the toilet roll sold in America comes from virgin forests, said Hershkowitz. In Europe and Latin America, up to 40 percent of toilet paper comes from recycled products. Greenpeace this week launched a cut-out-and-keep ecological ranking of toilet paper products.... Those brands, which put quilting and pockets of air between several layers of paper, are especially damaging to the environment.
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Part of Lone Star State now driest region in the nation
LUBBOCK -- Central Texas cattle raiser Gerry Shudde remembers Texas' drought of record in the 1950s when his family's ranch sometimes got a couple of 4-inch rainfalls a year.
But the drought ongoing now is far different.
"This is just cut off completely," the 74-year-old rancher said. "In a lot of ways, it's worse."
Across the nation's No. 2 agricultural state, drought conditions are evaporating stock tanks, keeping many crop farmers from planting into long-parched soil, forcing cattle producers to cull their herds, and dropping water levels in state lakes.
Despite hurricanes Dolly, Gustav and Ike soaking Texas in 2008, almost every part of the state -- nearly 97 percent -- is experiencing some drought, according to the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor map, released Feb. 26.
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'Ecstasy Oil' Threatens Cambodian Rainforests
Authorities, working with conservationists, have raided and closed several 'ecstasy oil' distilleries in Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains. The distilleries posed a threat to the region's rich biological diversity, reports Fauna and Flora International (FFI), the conservation group involved in the operation.
"The factories had been set up to distill 'sassafras oil'; produced by boiling the roots and the trunk of the exceptionally rare Mreah Prew Phnom trees and exported to neighbouring countries," said FFI. "The oil is used in the production of cosmetics, but can also be used as a precursor chemical in the altogether more sinister process of producing MDMA -- more commonly known as ecstasy. The distillation process not only threatens Mreah Prew Phnom trees, but damages the surrounding forest ecosystem. Producing sassafras oil is illegal in Cambodia."
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Dwindling Resources of Soil, Water and Air Require 'CDC for Planet Earth'
In her plenary address to the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting, Kieffer called for the creation of a "CDC for Planet Earth"--an organization that could respond to planetary threats such climate change with the same kind of coordination the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed during the SARS and bird flu outbreaks of the late 1990s.... Ocean acidification, spreading deserts, dry aquifers and degraded soils are stealth disasters, altering the planet in ways that "will undermine our survival and evolution into the civilized global society that we might become," warned Kieffer.... And for the first time in history, "societies of the whole planet are so interconnected that Planet Earth is essentially one island," where the stealth disasters of one region can become a crisis for the whole globe, she suggested.
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China's water deficit 'will create food shortage'
A leading climate change expert has warned that water shortage is the greatest threat to China's agricultural sector this century, amid a drought across the country.
As demand for water continues to rise and less is available for agriculture, "China will see a food shortfall of 5-10 per cent -- a disastrous outcome in a country of 1.3 billion people -- unless effective and timely measures are taken," said Lin Erda, one of China's top climate change experts and leader of a joint China-UK project, 'Impacts of Climate Change on Chinese Agriculture'.... When the current episode of drought reached its peak in early February it was affecting 1.6 million hectares of farmland in at least 12 provinces in northern China -- considered the country's breadbasket. Thanks to snow and rainfall last week the affected area has dropped to 497,000 hectares across eight provinces.
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U.S. renewable energy faces weak economy, old grid
People in the industries say the stimulus will help speed the process, but it still may not be fast enough to meet the Obama administration's goal of ramping up renewable energy production and related investments to revive the economy.
The stimulus extends tax breaks for generating electricity from renewable sources. The government also will provide incentives for homeowners and businesses to buy solar power equipment, and will help fund other energy-saving measures.... Even if demand for renewable energy surges, moving those power supplies will pose problems. The electricity grid is little changed from the one that powered the radios that carried President Roosevelt's fireside chats in the 1930s.
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Windmills flap helplessly as coal remains king
If you flick a switch today, the light goes on because of coal. Almost half the power generated in Britain on Tuesday came from coal and a bit more than a third from natural gas. Nuclear power stations were contributing 17 per cent and windmills provided 0.6 per cent.... After all the politics, we are breathless as our bright new whirligigs stand motionless on a beach horizon.
The wind has failed, as it does during periods of intense heat and cold, and although we have built, with enormous subsidy, enough wind turbines to generate 5 per cent of our electricity, no more than 1 per cent is operational when we need it.... The reason why we are still stuffing black lumps of carbon into furnaces is simple: it makes economic sense and the financial markets are shouting this message louder than ever before.
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World's fisheries face climate change threat
Researchers examined the fisheries of 132 nations to determine which were the most vulnerable, based on the potential environmental impact of climate change, how dependent their economy and diet were on fisheries, and the capacity of the country to adapt.
Climate change can affect the temperature of inland lakes, the health of reefs and how nutrients circulate in the oceans, the researchers say.
They identified 33 countries as "highly vulnerable" to the effects of global warming on fisheries.
These countries produce 20 per cent of the world's fish exports and 22 are already classified by the UN as "least developed". Inhabitants of vulnerable countries are also more dependent on fish for protein -- 27 per cent of dietary protein is gained from fish, compared with 13 per cent in other countries. Two-thirds of the most vulnerable nations identified are in tropical Africa.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Indonesia confirms that peatlands will be converted for plantations
Indonesia's Minister for the Environment has approved a decree that will allow the conversion of carbon-rich peatlands for oil palm plantations, reports The Jakarta Post.
Rachmat Witoelar said that oil palm plantations will only be established in areas where peat is less than 3 meters (10 feet) deep. Conversion will require an environmental impact analysis (Amdal).
"The conversion of peatlands is possible for certain criteria, but should be done very selectively," Rachmat told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday. "The conversion is strictly forbidden in [peatland] more than 3 meters deep." ... "Allowing the destruction of more peatlands is a disaster for the fight against climate change, and will only confirm Indonesia's status as the world's third biggest polluter," Greenpeace Southeast Asia forest campaigner Bustar Maitar told The Jakarta Post.
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Dramatic decline in size of trophy fish
Archival photographs spanning more than five decades reveal a drastic decline of so-called "trophy fish" caught around coral reefs surrounding Key West, Florida.... large predatory fish have declined in weight by 88 percent in modern photos compared to black-and-white shots from the 1950s. The average length of sharks declined by more than 50 percent in 50 years, the photographs revealed.
The study mirrors others that reveal stark changes to animal sizes caused by hunting or fishing, in which the largest of a species are often sought as trophy specimens.
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Los Angeles nears water rationing
With a recent flurry of winter storms doing little to dampen California's latest drought, the nation's biggest public utility voted on Tuesday to impose water rationing in Los Angeles for the first time in nearly two decades.
Under the plan adopted in principle by the governing board of the L.A. Department of Water and Power, homes and businesses would pay a penalty rate -- nearly double normal prices -- for any water they use in excess of a reduced monthly allowance.
The five-member board plans to formally vote on details of the measure next month.
The rationing scheme is expected to take effect in May unless the City Council acts before then to reject it -- a move seen as unlikely since Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called for the measure under a water-shortage plan last week.
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Overfishing Threatens Global Shrimp Industry - FAO
WINDHOEK -- Reducing fishing capacity and limiting access to shrimp fisheries are likely to mitigate over-fishing, by-catch and seabed destruction, which the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations said are some of the major economic and environmental side effects of shrimp fishing.... [S]hrimp fishing is also associated with over-fishing, the capture of juveniles of ecologically important and economically valuable species, coastal habitat degradation, illegal trawling, and the destruction of sea-grass beds.... Estimates are that shrimp trawl fishing, particularly in tropical regions, produces large amounts -- if not the greatest amount -- of discards, or 27.3 percent (1.86 million tonnes) of discards.
The environmental impact of trawling -- and including shrimp trawling -- has been likened to forest clear-cutting and accused of being the world's most wasteful fishing practice.
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Vegas water watchers raise drought fears
Water supplies to Las Vegas could run dry within six years thanks to receding water levels at Lake Mead, officials warned last week, bringing into question the long-term viability of the fastest growing city in the US.... Over the past nine years, the Colorado river, which feeds Lake Meade, has experienced an average inflow two-thirds of its normal intake, Mulroy said in his presentation.... But scientists remain fearful that in the long term the desert city will have to find alternative water supplies and may even become unviable.
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Greenland fishing villages abandoned as fish are driven to colder water
Coastal fishing villages such as Ikateq used to be home to families who relied on regular catches of Arctic char, a fish closely related to salmon. But warmer ocean temperatures in recent years have forced the char to migrate north to cooler waters, ending a way of life.
Traditional villages are now ghost towns, with dogsleds and fish-drying racks lying unused outside abandoned houses.
With no way to support themselves, villagers have been forced to move to urban centres the largest city and capital, Nuuk, has a population of about 15,000. Ms Smirk says most of the displaced have no other way to earn a living and rely on social welfare.
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Shrinking Water Supplies Imperil Farmers
The state's water supply has dropped precipitously of late. California is locked in the third year of one of its worst droughts on record, with reservoirs holding as little as 22 percent of capacity.... At the Harris Farms near Coalinga, managers said they plan this year to sideline 9,000 of 11,000 acres they used to plant with tomatoes, onions, broccoli and other vegetables. Harris has been reducing production for two years because of declining water, and now must cut even more than planned. "You feel like a general in a battle," said John Harris, chairman and chief executive of the business. "You're in constant retreat."... In the Modesto metropolitan area, housing prices have declined 55 percent...
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Drought in northern China
...After 100 days without precipitation in the region, the government has declared a "Level 1" emergency for the worst drought in 50 years, authorising an extra 300m yuan ($44m) in special drought-relief spending. It will finance everything from cloud-seeding rockets to the digging of new wells and tankers to deliver water. This year's winter-wheat harvest is at risk. February 8th saw some rain, but only 5-10 millimetres, compared with 200mm farmers say they need in coming months.
The drought comes at a difficult moment. The global downturn has hit China's exporters hard, and millions of rural migrants have lost their jobs in coastal factories and returned to their villages....China's water woes will only worsen, especially for farmers. When supplies tighten, urban and industrial users usually have priority. Ma Jun, a water specialist in Beijing, says that since the 1950s China has been digging ever deeper wells, and building ever more dams, canals, and water diversion projects. But all this has taken a toll. Because of lower water-tables and depleted aquifers, many rivers can no longer replenish themselves in the dry season.
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Pride of Argentina Falls on Hard Times
Argentina is suffering its worst drought in decades and the cattle are dying by the barnload. Since October, the drought has taken down 1.5 million of the animals, according to an estimate by the Argentine Rural Society, in a country that last year sent 13.5 million to slaughter. The cattle for the most part are dying of hunger, as the dry skies have shriveled up their pastures, along with huge swaths of Argentina's important soy, corn and wheat fields.
"The drought has affected practically the entire country, the cattle-ranching sector, agriculture. It is the most intense, prolonged and expensive drought in the past 50 years," Hugo Luis Biolcati, the president of the Argentine Rural Society, said in the organization's offices in Buenos Aires. "I think we are facing a very bad year."
The cattlemen at the century-old Liniers Market in Buenos Aires, one of the largest cow auctions in the world, with about 40,000 animals passing through each week, tend to agree. In wooden pens, spines and ribs jut out under the many taut hides jostling together.
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World's fish at risk as countries flout fishing code, study finds
The time has come for responsible fishing guidelines to be enforced as law internationally because the voluntary code of conduct currently in place has failed to save the world's fish from being depleted, fisheries researchers say.
A recent study found "dismayingly poor compliance" among countries around the world with the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 1995, said a commentary published this week in Nature.... "Overall, compliance is poor, with room for improvement at every level in the rankings," the commentary said, adding that even top-ranking countries such as Canada were given "fail" grades for certain practices and none achieved a "good" ranking.
Only Norway, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Iceland and Namibia received overall compliance scores of 60 per cent, and 28 countries that haul in 40 per cent of the global catch had "unequivocal fail grades overall," the study said.... It added that while it may have been necessary 13 years ago to make the agreement voluntary, there is more widespread agreement now that continued overfishing is hurting ecosystems and threatening food supplies, and something needs to be done.
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Why sustainable power is unsustainable
Renewable energy needs to become a lot more renewable -- a theme that emerged at the Financial Times Energy Conference in London this week.
Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, and more unpredictable, the most advanced "renewable" technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources, attendees heard.
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Dark Days for Green Energy
Wind and solar power have been growing at a blistering pace in recent years, and that growth seemed likely to accelerate under the green-minded Obama administration. But because of the credit crisis and the broader economic downturn, the opposite is happening: installation of wind and solar power is plummeting. Factories building parts for these industries have announced a wave of layoffs in recent weeks, and trade groups are projecting 30 to 50 percent declines this year in installation of new equipment, barring more help from the government.
Prices for turbines and solar panels, which soared when the boom began a few years ago, are falling. Communities that were patting themselves on the back just last year for attracting a wind or solar plant are now coping with cutbacks.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Japan rejects deal to limit whaling to its own waters
The [International Whaling Commission] has proposed that Japan scale back or halt its whaling in the Antarctic Ocean over the next five years, a suggestion that Shigeru Ishiba, minister of fisheries, dismissed as "unacceptable."
Tokyo "will not be able to accept any proposal that would prohibit Japan from continuing its research whaling," he told reporters.
Environmental campaigners have also condemned the IWC plan.... "This one-way compromise would lift the commercial whaling moratorium, allow the government of Japan to kill endangered species and permit illegal high-seas whaling to continue," he said.
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Malaysian government says forest reserve 'plundered' for oil palm development
Responding to allegations by the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam) that indigenous people have been forced from their lands (a charge it denied), the Sabah Forestry Department said that more than 30 percent of Mt. Pock And Tanjong Nagos Forest Reserves were "plundered" by "people with means to plant illegal oil palm including companies" up until 2001. The statement is noteworthy in that leaders of the Malaysian Palm Oil Council, the marketing and lobbying arm of the Malaysian palm oil industry, have maintained that oil expansion has not taken place at the expense of natural forest in Malaysia. The Forestry Department statement noted that oil palm companies spent million of ringgit "to develop the illegal oil palm including the recruitment of illegal workers to destroy forests and intimidate Forestry Department staff on the ground." It said that 202 people were arrested in the reserves between 2003 and 2006. Statewide, 732 were apprehended for illegal encroachment. 471 of these were illegal immigrants.
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Water - another global 'crisis'?
Among people who study human development, it is a widely-held view that each person needs about 20 litres of water each day for the basics - to drink, cook and wash sufficiently to avoid disease transmission.
Yet at the height of the East African drought, people were getting by on less than five litres a day - in some cases, less than one litre a day, enough for just three glasses of drinking water and nothing left over. Some people, perhaps incredibly from a western vantage point, are hardy enough to survive in these conditions; but it is not a recipe for a society that is healthy and developing enough to break out of poverty.
"Obviously there are many drivers of human development," says the UN's Andrew Hudson.
"But water is the most important."
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Deep trouble for wells in Eastern Washington
A groundwater-mapping study that tracks how water trickles under Eastern Washington shows deep wells in four counties are in deep trouble.
The two-year study done by the Columbia Basin Groundwater Management Area, based in Othello, found that aquifer levels are dropping fast, that most deep wells in the study area are drawing water left from the ice-age floods at least 10,000 years ago, and that there is virtually no chance Lake Roosevelt is recharging deep wells in Eastern Washington's driest counties.
"This is a major issue for cities and big irrigators," said Paul Stoker, executive director of the groundwater agency.
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Britain 'must revive farms' to avoid grave food crisis
Britain faces a major food crisis unless urgent steps are taken to revive its flagging agricultural sector, warns one of the world's most influential thinktanks.... The thinktank on international affairs also claims the UK's consumers must expect to pay significantly more for their food if they want the country to develop a long-term sustainable food policy.... [T]he report's authors quote experts in the food supply chain who believe the prospect of the UK being hit by a crisis is "highly likely". The report claims: "What we had thought of as abundant food supply is anything but. Western societies, in particular, have tended to take their food supply for granted. The global system will reach breaking point unless action is taken."
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Rising Acidity Is Threatening Food Web of Oceans, Science Panel Says
[As CO2] dissolves, it makes seawater more acidic. Now an international panel of marine scientists says this acidity is accelerating so fast it threatens the survival of coral reefs, shellfish and the marine food web generally.... "Severe damages are imminent," the group said Friday in a statement summing up its deliberations at a symposium in Monaco last October. The statement, called the Monaco Declaration, said increasing acidity was interfering with the growth and health of shellfish and eating away at coral reefs, processes that would eventually affect marine food webs generally.
Already, the group said, there have been detectable decreases in shellfish and shell weights, and interference with the growth of coral skeletons.
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"The lake doesn't have a future"
Lake Victoria, spanning 68,800 square kilometres and three countries – Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda – is home to more than 30 million people, a population that depends on this body of water, even as they choke the life out of it.
Godfrey Ogonda, an environmental scientist with the Friends of Lake Victoria, describes the assault on the lake as an "integrated" problem. It sounds innocuous enough until he explains that deforestation upstream is speeding soil erosion and washing excessive nutrients into the lake; unplanned settlements are pouring untreated human waste into the mix; overfishing is chronic; climate change is reducing rainfall and raising temperatures; and invasive species are attacking the weakened ecosystem... Named in 1858 after Queen Victoria, the largest tropical lake in the world is the reservoir of the mighty Nile river and it is close to joining the ranks of dying lakes.
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Acid oceans 'need urgent action'
The world's marine ecosystems risk being severely damaged by ocean acidification unless there are dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions, warn scientists.
More than 150 top marine researchers have voiced their concerns through the "Monaco Declaration", which warns that changes in acidity are accelerating.... It says pH levels are changing 100 times faster than natural variability. ... The researchers warn that ocean acidification, which they refer to as "the other CO2 problem", could make most regions of the ocean inhospitable to coral reefs by 2050, if atmospheric CO2 levels continue to increase.
They also say that it could lead to substantial changes in commercial fish stocks, threatening food security for millions of people.
"The chemistry is so fundamental and changes so rapid and severe that impacts on organisms appear unavoidable," said Dr James Orr, chairman of the symposium.
"The questions are now how bad will it be and how soon will it happen."
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Glaciers decline in ice mass for 18th straight year
Glaciers worldwide lost ice mass for the 18th consecutive year due to warming temperatures and reduce snowfall, reports the University of Zurich’s World Glacier Monitoring Service.
Alpine glaciers lost on average 1.3 meters of thickness in 2006 and 0.7 meters in 2007, extending an 11.3-meter (36-foot) retreat since 1980. The pace melting has more than doubled since the 1990s.... The environmental consequences of melting glaciers are significant. Glaciers store massive amounts of water and their disappearance puts water supplies and agriculture in many regions at risk. Further, glacial melt is the largest contributor to rising sea levels according to a study published in Science in July 2007.
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Substantial work ahead for water issues, say scientists at ACS' Final Report briefing
Scientists and engineers will face a host of obstacles over the next decade in providing clean water to millions of people caught up in a water shortage crisis, a panel of scientists and engineers said today... Although Edwards stressed the importance of water conservation in meeting those, he also cited unintended consequences of such efforts. He noted, for instance, that reduced-flush toilets and other water conservation methods are allowing water to remain in household pipes longer. As it stagnates in pipes, the water could develop undesirable characteristics and have unwanted effects on household plumbing.... For instance, hypoxic zones in the Bay -- large areas of low oxygen levels where most animals can't live -- are still growing despite lacking the nutrients they need for expansion. "We don't fully understood why that is so," Ball said. "There's a lot to be learned yet about what locations and causes lead to that phenomenon, whether there are carbon sources coming in from the shallows into the deep that current models and understanding don't capture."... For example, the use of sensors to detect potentially toxic substances in water could provide general benefits for safety. Cost-effective, low maintenance sensors are a Holy Grail, Haas said, but difficult to develop. He warned that over-sensitive sensors could be counterproductive.
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Ecologists warn the planet is running short of water
A swelling global population, changing diets and mankind's expanding "water footprint" could be bringing an end to the era of cheap water.
The warnings, in an annual report by the Pacific Institute in California, come as ecologists have begun adopting the term "peak ecological water"-- the point where, like the concept of "peak oil", the world has to confront a natural limit on something once considered virtually infinite.
The world is in danger of running out of "sustainably managed water", according to Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute and a leading authority on global freshwater resources.... A glass of orange juice, for example, needs 850 litres of fresh water to produce, according to the Pacific Institute and the Water Footprint Network, while the manufacture of a kilogram of microchips -- requiring constant cleaning to remove chemicals -- needs about 16,000 litres. A hamburger comes in at 2,400 litres of fresh water, depending on the origin and type of meat used.
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Industrialization of China increases fragility of global food supply
Global grain markets are facing [a] breaking point according to new research by the University of Leeds into the agricultural stability of China.
Experts predict that if China's recent urbanisation trends continue, and the country imports just 5 percent more of its grain, the entire world's grain export would be swallowed whole.
The knock-on effect on the food supply -- and on prices -- to developing nations could be huge.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Growing Taste for Reef Fish Sends Their Numbers Sinking
KOTA KINABALU, Malaysia -- ... The fierce appetite for live reef fish across Southeast Asia — and increasingly in mainland China — is devastating populations in the Coral Triangle, a protected marine region home to the world’s richest ocean diversity, according to a recent report in the scientific journal Conservation Biology. Spawning of reef fish in this area, which supports 75 percent of all known coral species in the world, has declined 79 percent over the past 5 to 20 years, depending on location, according to the report.... She added, "From a very practical perspective, loss of the aggregations ultimately means loss of the associated fishery, so it makes good practical sense to change our attitude."
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Tibetan glacial shrink to cut water supply by 2050
Nearly 2 billion people in Asia, from coastal city dwellers to yak-herding nomads, will begin suffering water shortages in coming decades as global warming shrinks glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, experts said.
The plateau has more than 45,000 glaciers that build up during the snowy season and then drain to the major rivers in Asia, including the Yangtze, Yellow, Brahmanputra and Mekong.
Temperatures in the plateau, which some scientists call the "Third Pole" for its massive glacial ice sheets, are rising twice as fast as other parts of the world, said Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, who has collected ice cores from glaciers around the world for decades.
As glaciers melt at faster rates from the higher temperatures, a false sense of security about water supplies has developed across Asia, Thompson said on Friday.
If melting continues at current levels, two-thirds of the plateau's glaciers will likely be gone by 2050, he said at a meeting on climate change at the Asia Society in Manhattan.
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Returning to 'normal' is no longer an option
In the first half of the year, volatile commodity prices, especially for food and oil, hit the world's poorest people hard. In the second half was the global financial catastrophe.
Yet, could the crises of food, fuel and finance that we experienced last year simply be three canaries in the coal mine? What if these are just the early warning signals that our current economic system is not sustainable at a much deeper level? ... Those of us in middle age today in richer countries are the third successive generation to benefit from the natural resource bubble that our first world economy has exploited since the mid-20th century.
It is highly unlikely -- unless we make some deep, structural changes to how we manage our economy -- that our children and their children will experience the same sense of progress and wealth.
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Peak Phosphorus?
First there was 'Peak Oil', then there was talk of 'Peak Water', but 'Peak Phosphorus' may trump them all as a sustainability issue without rival.
Fact: Phosphorus is a non-renewable resource for which there is no substitute.... The timing for Peak phosphorus may be 50 years out, or a hundred and fifty years, but as with peak oil, it's not a question of if, but when. There has already been considerable volatility in Phosphorus markets in the past year, possibly related more to volatility in the energy market and this has trickled through into food prices.
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Indonesia to allow trawling despite overfishing fears
Indonesia will allow trawling in selected areas for the first time in 30 years despite concerns about overfishing, an official said Thursday.
Trawling, in which boats tow long nets that scoop up everything in their path, would be permitted this year off four areas of Borneo island's east Kalimantan province, maritime ministry official Bambang Sutejo said.
He dismissed concerns about overfishing but acknowledged that illegal trawling was already rampant in the area.
"There will not be overfishing this time as we're only allowing small boats to trawl, and it's not allowed in other parts of Indonesia," he said, adding that legalising trawling would help fight illegal trawlers.
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Nations that sow food crops for biofuels may reap less than previously thought
Global yields of most biofuels crops, including corn, rapeseed and wheat, have been overestimated by 100 to 150 percent or more, suggesting many countries need to reset their expectations of agricultural biofuels to a more realistic level.
That's according to a study led by Matt Johnston and Tracey Holloway of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and Jon Foley of University of Minnesota, which drew on actual agricultural data from nearly 240 countries to calculate the potential yields of 20 different biofuels worldwide.
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Food Production Chaos Looms in Africa as Soil Quality Worsens
African farmers and climate change are combining to damage soil at a rate that may plunge the continent, home to about 1 billion people, into chaos as food production declines.
“The situation is very severe and soil fertility is declining rapidly,” Jeroen Huising, a scientist who studies soils at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, or CIAT, said today in an interview. “Many countries like Kenya already don’t have enough food to feed their population and soil degradation is worsening an already critical situation.”
Africa, where half the agricultural soil has lost nutrients necessary to grow plants, is hampered by a lack of information about soil conditions, Huising said. About 236 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, or one in three there, are chronically hungry, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
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Food crisis due to warming world trumps all other worries, say scientists
Many of today's toddlers face the grim prospect of coping with chronic food shortages in their old age if agricultural science doesn't adapt to a warming world, concluded scientists in a study published Friday in the journal Science.
The stark report, from scientists at Stanford University and the University of Washington, makes melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels from global warming appear minor compared with the prospect of hundreds of millions of people, including those living in Europe and the United States, anxiously seeking stable food supplies. ... By the end of the century, the worst of the heat waves in recent times will become the normal average summertime temperatures, the researchers reported. They based their conclusions on 23 climate models in a 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as data from severe heat waves dating several decades.
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Two Google searches 'produce same CO2 as boiling a kettle'
A typical search through the online giant's website is thought to generate about 7g of carbon dioxide. Boiling a kettle produces about 15g.
The emissions are caused both by the electricity required to power a user's computer and send their request to servers around the world.
The discovery comes amid increasing warnings about the little-known environmental impact of computer and internet use.
According to Gartner, an American research firm, IT now causes about two per cent of global CO2 emissions and its carbon footprint exceeded that of the world's aviation industry for the first time in 2007.
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US recycling: 'I don't even think we have an industry'
"Across the street we would process 600 customers on a weekday, 1,000 at the weekend," he says. "The whole spectrum -- the homeowner who has stockpiled aluminium cans, the bar down the street that has a load of beer bottles, the liquor store with used cardboard. Now it's probably half that number."
Young is on the frontline of a crash in commodity prices that has seen the global market for recycled paper, cardboard, plastic, metals and glass all but disappear. In three weeks in October, the price of paper went from $200 to $20 a ton, corrugated cardboard dropped from $250 a ton in August to $100 in December. It is the worst he has seen since founding the company in 1963.
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Tangerine growers tell beekeepers to buzz off
Is it trespassing when bees do what bees do in California's tangerine groves?
That is the question being weighed by state agriculture officials caught between beekeepers who prize orange blossom honey and citrus growers who blame the bees for causing otherwise seedless mandarin oranges to develop pips.... Beekeepers say that, with development in the state's agricultural regions, there already are a limited number of places to take the bees for feeding.
"Our winter losses are increasing (because of colony collapse), and part of the problem is finding places to put bees where they have access to natural food, and citrus is part of that," said Gene Brandi, a Los Banos beekeeper and legislative liaison for the California State Beekeepers Association. [thanks, Janet!]
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Monsanto seeks FDA approval for drought-tolerant corn
KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - Monsanto Co said Wednesday it filed for U.S. regulatory approval for what could be the world's first drought-tolerant corn, a product that agricultural companies around the globe are racing to roll out amid fears of global warming and the needs of a growing population.
Monsanto said it submitted its product to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for regulatory clearance. It is working with German-based BASF on the project.
The two companies are jointly contributing $1.5 billion to a venture aimed at developing higher-yielding crops and crops more tolerant to adverse environmental conditions, such as drought, which has eroded production in countries around the world in recent years.
"It's been everybody's dream to have a drought-tolerant crop," said Iowa State University agronomist Roger Elmore, though he pointed out advantages would vary widely depending on geography.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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As beetle invasion rages, a debate over logs
Tromping through a snowy thicket of lodgepole pine, forester Tim Love identifies the telltale signs that the trees are, in his words, "dead already but don't know it."... These are the visible scars of massive beetle destruction that now stretches from Colorado to British Columbia. Soon, wind will likely finish off the pockmarked lodgepoles, sending them crashing to the forest floor, says Mr. Love, a district ranger in the Lolo National Forest in Montana. That's a fire hazard headache for the forest service -- and, some say, a missed opportunity.... An estimated 2.4 million acres across five northern US states show visible signs of trees killed by the beetles, according to data from Gregg DeNitto with the US Forest Service in Missoula.
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Wind turbine destroyed after 'octopus UFO' seen in sky
Dozens of residents claimed to have seen bright flashing spheres is the skies near Louth, Lincolnshire, where a 290ft turbine was mangled in a mystery collision.
One woman said she saw the an object fly towards the wind farm, while others described the lights as being linked by "tentacles", leading locals to dub it the octopus UFO.... Later on Sunday night, one of a turbine's 65ft blades was ripped off and another severely damaged.
The Health and Safety Executive described the damage as a "unique incident", and the energy firm Ecotricity which owns the 20-turbine site say it has no explanation.
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Daily Mail turns incandescent with lightbulb rage
As of just now the Daily Mail's hotline, giving away 5,000 sets of traditional incandescent no-nonsense lightbulbs is all out of its daily allocation of gas guzzling bulbs. The Mail is kindly dispensing them as a rebellion against the phasing out of 75w and 100w lightbulbs by 2012.... But deep down I know they've gone to people who take the right to install gas guzzling bulbs as the right to bear arms and whine on about how (traditional) incandescent lightbulbs heat the house with all that excess heat -- about efficient as using a hairdryer as your primary source of space heating...
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Amazon Deforestation Trend On The Increase
Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon forests has flipped from a decreasing to an increasing trend, according to new annual figures recently released by the country's space agency INPE. Commenting on the figures, Brazilian environment minister Carlos Minc confirmed that the government will on Monday announce forest related carbon emission reduction targets, which will link halting deforestation to the national climate change campaign. From August 2007 to July 2008, Brazil deforested 11,968 square kilometers of forests in the area designated as the Legal Amazon, a 3.8 per cent increase over the previous year and an unwelcome surprise following declines of 18 per cent over the previous period.
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Paradise lost on Maldives' rubbish island
It may be known as a tropical paradise, an archipelago of 1,200 coral islands in the Indian Ocean. But the traditional image of the Maldives hides a dirty secret: the world's biggest rubbish island.
A few miles and a short boat ride from the Maldivian capital, Malé, Thilafushi began life as a reclamation project in 1992. The artificial island was built to solve Malé's refuse problem. But today, with more than 10,000 tourists a week in the Maldives adding their waste, the rubbish island now covers 50 hectares (124 acres).... Environmentalists say that more than 330 tonnes of rubbish is brought to Thilafushi a day. Most of it comes from Malé, which is one of the world's most densely populated towns: 100,000 people cram into 2 square kilometres.
Brought on ships, the rubbish is taken onshore and sifted by hand. Some of the waste is incinerated but most is buried in landfill sites. There is, say environmental campaigners, also an alarming rise in batteries and electronic waste being dumped in Thilafushi's lagoon.
"We are seeing used batteries, asbestos, lead and other potentially hazardous waste mixed with the municipal solid wastes being put into the water...."
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Signs of Another California Drought Year
SAN FRANCISCO-- California, just finished with its second consecutive year of drought, might well be facing a third. If so, state authorities may be forced to impose water rationing on farmers, homes and businesses.
With the rainy season well under way, early partial measurements indicate that the amount of water stored in the Sierra snowpack, the state's natural reservoir, is higher than the amount at this time last year but well below average, said the state's meteorologist, Elissa Lynn.
The deficit can be made up if January, February and March are full of big Pacific storms. But this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the weather phenomenon known as La Nina, which is characterized by cooler waters in the western Pacific Ocean and drier conditions, had returned for the second consecutive year.
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Troubled waters -- the ocean collapse
The evidence abounds. The fish that once seemed an inexhaustible source of food are now almost everywhere in decline: 90 percent of large predatory fish (the big ones such as tuna, swordfish and sharks) have gone, according to some scientists. In estuaries and coastal waters, 85 percent of the large whales have disappeared, and nearly 60 percent of the small ones. Many of the smaller fish are also in decline. Indeed, most familiar sea creatures, from albatrosses to walruses, from seals to oysters, have suffered huge losses.
All this has happened fairly recently. Cod have been caught off Nova Scotia for centuries, but their systematic slaughter began only after 1852; in terms of their biomass (the aggregate mass of the species), they are now 96 percent depleted. The killing of turtles in the Caribbean (99 percent down) started in the 1700s. The hunting of sharks in the Gulf of Mexico (45-99 percent, depending on the variety) got going only in the 1950s.
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95 months and counting
From today, based on the best estimates available, we have eight years to head-off potentially uncontrollable climatic upheaval. What can happen in eight years? Quite a lot, actually. A world war can begin, and end. Two, in fact.... [H]istory tells us great things are possible. We are still in control. We just need to build, rapidly, new energy and transport systems and change our behaviour.
Only, we seem to have forgotten what we are capable of. Victorian engineers would have been aghast at our timidity. Within our 8 year time frame, for example, between 1845 and 1852 there were 4,400 miles of railway track laid in Britain.
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Idaho miners won't have to restore groundwater
Monsanto Co., Agrium Inc., and J.R. Simplot Co. will be able to mine phosphate without being forced to restore groundwater beneath their operations to its natural condition, according to a new rule awaiting approval by the 2009 Legislature.... "We have never asked for the right to mess up someone else's beneficial use of the groundwater," [lobbyist for Idaho Mining Association] Lyman told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "The department came up with a rule they think is workable, without putting our industry into a difficult situation where we'd be unable to comply."
The rule is backed by industry but opposed by environmentalists including the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and Idaho Conservation League, who say it gives mining companies near the Idaho-Wyoming border license to pollute forever.
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How the West’s Energy Boom Could Threaten Drinking Water for 1 in 12 Americans
The Colorado River, the life vein of the Southwestern United States, is in trouble.
The river's water is hoarded the moment it trickles out of the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado and begins its 1,450-mile journey to Mexico's border. It runs south through seven states and the Grand Canyon, delivering water to Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Diego. Along the way, it powers homes for 3 million people, nourishes 15 percent of the nation's crops and provides drinking water to one in 12 Americans.
Now a rush to develop domestic oil, gas and uranium deposits along the river and its tributaries threatens its future.
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Global oil supply will peak in 2020, says energy agency
Global oil production will peak much earlier than expected amid a collapse in petroleum investment due to the credit crunch, one of the world's foremost experts has revealed.
Fatih Birol, chief economist to the International Energy Agency, told the Guardian that conventional crude output could plateau in 2020, a development that was "not good news" for a world still heavily dependent on petroleum.
The prediction came as oil companies from Saudi Arabia to Canada cut their capital expenditure on new projects in response to a fall in oil prices, moves that will further reduce supply in future.
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Drought parches much of the U.S., may get worse
...At least 36 states expect to face water shortages within the next five years, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. According to the National Drought Mitigation Center, several regions in particular have been hit hard: the Southeast, Southwest and the West. Texas, Georgia and South Carolina have suffered the worst droughts this year, the agency said.
Yet most people don't need a federal agency to tell them there's a water shortage. Plenty of cities have implemented water bans while state squabbles over water usage are common in some regions. What may surprise people, though, are the causes for the recent drought. It's not global warming, some climatologists say. The droughts are caused by rapid population growth and unwise agricultural choices.
John R. Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, says the last three years have been drier than usual in many parts of the United States, but overall there's been no shortage of rainfall. He says the U.S. mainland experienced worse droughts in the 12th and 16th centuries.
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Computer hackers are helping illegal loggers destroy the Amazon rainforest
Computer hackers are helping illegal loggers destroy the Amazon rainforest by breaking into the Brazilian government's timber tracking system and altering the records so as to increase logging allocations, reports Greenpeace.... "By hacking into the permit system, these companies have made their timber shipments appear legal and compliant with the forest management plans. But in reality, they're trading illegal timber which is making the problem of deforestation worse, and a lack of control and policing in the areas they're logging means they think they can get away with it."
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Another fisheries commission throws the science overboard
The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) today over-rode the advice of its science committee and rejected the recommendations of its chair in choosing only minor reductions in catch for bigeye and yellowfin tuna and watering down or deferring most measures for achieving reduced catches.... Measures adopted by the WCPFC will see a catch reduction of less than seven per cent for 2009 on WWF estimations, well down on a recommendation of a 30 percent cut which it was conceded would still not have eliminated overfishing. Among the discarded, delayed or reduced measures were high seas fishing closures, restrictions on gear types, and important initiatives to better record and verify catches and crack down on rampant illegal fishing.
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At Poznan, no one is listening to Peak Oil
The community of nations have been talking for more than 18 years now about how to stop humanity's remorseless effort to cook its own home. These gabfests have largely been action-free zones. I have attended too many of them, but this year it was time to risk my blood-pressure on another.... One of my missions was an effort to raise the peak oil issue. I suspect that most of the 9,000-plus attendees -- diplomats, lobbyists and journalists -- may have little idea how strong the evidence is that a global energy crisis lurks just a few years in the future, and that it will have massive implications for climate change policymaking.... This year, for the first time, the IEA has conducted an oilfield-by-oilfield study of the world's existing oil reserves. It shows that the fields currently in production are running out alarmingly fast. The average depletion rate of 580 of the world's largest fields, all past their peak of production, is fully 6.7 percen per annum.
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Fisherman land 30 per cent increase in North Sea cod quotas
Scottish fishermen have won a 30 per cent increase in the amount of cod they are allowed to land next year in return for signing up to tough new regulations.... Previously any fish under a certain size had to be discarded in a bid to preserve stocks, but under the new deal it will be prohibited to throw back any fish that is "marketable".
Bertie Armstrong, chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation, warned the new regulations could be burdensome, depending on the small print.
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Darfur crisis is stripping the environment
Tree cover has become so sparse in some areas that Darfuris often have to travel more than 75 kilometres from their camps to find enough wood to sell or use for fuel, the report added.
"We're now seeing extreme stress on the environment around many of the camps and the major towns in Darfur," said UNEP's Sudan country director Clive Bates in a statement. "We need to plant millions of trees and introduce new technologies for construction and energy as quickly as humanly possible."... Nyala's famous Kunduwa hardwood forest had been destroyed by extensive logging from 2005 to 2007 said the report, adding "its destruction is regarded by many as a tragedy that could have been avoided".
The report called for development organisations to launch environmental awareness campaigns in the region, and to pilot the use of alternative fuel sources and building materials.
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Back at Junk Value, Recyclables Are Piling Up
The economic downturn has decimated the market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices.
Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life. "It's awful," said Briana Sternberg, education and outreach coordinator for Sedona Recycles, a nonprofit group in Arizona that recently stopped taking certain types of cardboard...
"Either it goes to landfill or it begins to cost us money," Ms. Sternberg said.
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California's Deep Sea Secrets: New Species Found, Human Impact Revealed
Scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego returning from research expeditions in Mexico have captured unprecedented details of vibrant sea life and ecosystems in the Gulf of California, including documentations of new species and marine animals previously never seen alive. Yet the expeditions, which included surveys at unexplored depths, have revealed disturbing declines in sea-life populations and evidence that human impacts have stretched down deeply in the gulf.... Large schools of fish documented in earlier expeditions at locations such as El Bajo seamount have vanished.... "We have lots of evidence of ghost nets with trapped animals at many depths, along with pollution, including beer cans, in each deep location we studied."
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Native Hunters -- Climate is thinning caribou herds
Chief Bill Erasmus of the Dene nation in northern Canada brought a stark warning about the climate crisis: The once abundant herds of caribou are dwindling, rivers are running lower and the ice is too thin to hunt on.
Erasmus raised his concerns in recent days on the sidelines of a U.N. climate conference, seeking to ensure that North America's indigenous peoples are not left out in the cold when it comes to any global warming negotiations.
Erasmus, the 54-year-old elected leader of 30,000 native Americans in Canada, and representatives of other indigenous peoples met with the U.N.'s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, and have lobbied national delegations to recognize them as an "expert group" that can participate in the talks like other nongovernment organizations.
"We bring our traditional knowledge to the table that other people don't have," he said.
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Starting to run on empty
About 40 percent of the water used in Texas comes from the Ogallala, and almost all of that is poured onto farmland -- in staggering amounts.
In a given year, more water is used to irrigate farms in each of a half-dozen Panhandle counties than is pumped out of the entire Edwards Aquifer, the primary water source for San Antonio and much of South-Central Texas.
Rainfall can't keep pace with all that pumping, so the Ogallala's water table drops by an average of nearly 2 feet per year in this part of Texas. In places where corn production is especially intense, average annual declines have been found that exceed 8 feet.... Meanwhile, existing water supplies for the Panhandle are projected to decline by 40 percent by 2060.
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Drought forces state to buy water or run dry
FOR the first time in its history, South Australia will have to buy water to guarantee supplies for critical human needs next year, revealing the increasing severity of the nation's water crisis at the end of the Murray River.
Necessary water supplies to Adelaide and towns across the state are at this stage not secured from July next year, which has forced the Rann Government on to the open water market.
It has already bought 30 gigalitres from water resources shared with NSW and Victoria and admitted yesterday it had spent tens of millions of dollars to bolster the state's supplies.
Authorities must have 201gigalitres in reserve to ensure the water needs of the nation's fifth-largest city and the rest of the state are able to be met.
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Study: One-third Of World's Fish Catches Are Being Wasted As Animal Feed; 'It Defies Reason'
An alarming new study to be published in November in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources finds that one-third of the world's marine fish catches are ground up and fed to farm-raised fish, pigs, and poultry, squandering a precious food resource for humans and disregarding the serious overfishing crisis in our oceans.... "We need to stop using so many small ocean fish to feed farmed fish and other animals," Alder said. "These small, tasty fish could instead feed people. Society should demand that we stop wasting these fish on farmed fish, pigs, and poultry." Although feeds derived from soy and other land-based crops are available and are used, fishmeal and fish oil have skyrocketed in popularity because forage fish are easy to catch in large numbers, and hence, relatively inexpensive.
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Chain reaction that stems from global warming
The birds that are now in trouble feed mainly on sandeels, a small fish usually found in large shoals and forming a key element in the marine food chains. Sandeels are also part of a fishery. In the past, over-exploitation of the stocks was thought to have an impact on seabirds but now this is not reckoned to be the case.... [I]t seems clear that something other than over-fishing is affecting the sandeels and the birds that depend on them.
The RSPB scientists have pointed to reports of significant declines in the biomass of plankton that forms the basis of almost all the marine food chains.
The plant element, the phytoplankton, can be looked on as the grass of the ocean. Everything else depends on it, including the larvae of the sandeels. It is suspected that the higher winter sea-surface temperatures being recorded are somehow disrupting the food chain.
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Brazil to cut Amazon deforestation by 70 percent to fight global warming
Brazil will aim to cut its deforestation rate by 70 percent by 2018 under its plan to reduce emissions from forest clearing, Environment Minister Carlos Minc.
The plan will be financed by the country's Amazon Fund which relies on voluntary contributions from governments, corporations, and wealthy individuals. Norway has pledged up to a billion dollars to the fund depending on Brazil's effectiveness in reducing deforestation. Contributors are not eligible for carbon credits.
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Food price crisis and financial crisis present double threat for poor people
The combined impact of low economic growth and decreased investments in agriculture could cause major increases in malnutrition in developing countries, according to new analysis by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The result could be 16 million more undernourished children in 2020.... "IFPRI recommends three priorities for action: (1) promote pro-poor agricultural growth, (2) reduce market volatility, and (3) expand social safety nets and child nutrition programs.
"Ultimately, our measure of success should not be defined by the price of food, but by the provision of adequate healthy food for all," he said.
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Amazon deforestation rises slightly to 4,600 square miles in 2008
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased slightly for the August 2007-July 2008 period, reports the country's National Institute of Space Research (INPE). The rise is the first since 2004 when 27,379 square kilometers were destroyed, but is lower than forecast. The 2008 figure is the second-lowest annual loss since 1991.... Regional climate trends indicate that large swathes of the Amazon are increasingly susceptible to drought and fire. Coupled with continued deforestation, degradation, and fragmentation, some researchers say the Amazon is approaching a critical tipping point which could see more than half of the forest damaged or destroyed within a generation.
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Screw cap wine bottles threaten rare species
Cork oak forests, which cover 2.7 million of hectares worldwide and support rare species such as Iberian lynx, black storks and booted eagles, are already disappearing in some areas.
Faced with falling demand for cork stoppers, which make up 70 per cent of the income from cork harvests, farmers are ripping up trees that have been on their land for hundreds of years in an attempt to grow alternative crops, such as eucalyptus.
The land that cork oaks grow on, however, is poor quality and when the trees are removed, the land often turns into desert. In the Algarve, Portugal, cork forests have declined by 28 per cent in the past 10 years.
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Drought deepens strain on a dwindling Colorado
The drought gripping Utah, Southern California and the rest of the Southwest this century shows no sign of ending. Scientists see it as a permanent condition that, despite year-to-year weather variations, will deepen as temperatures rise, snows dwindle, soils bake and fires burn.... Making matters worse, the Colorado -- the 1,450-mile-long lifeline that sustains more than 30 million souls and 3.5 million acres of farmland in seven states, 34 tribal nations and Mexico -- is in decline, scientists warn....Trend analyses by federal scientists, probably conservative, predict the population dependent on the river will reach at least 38 million during the coming decade.
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Asian Beetle Spells Death for Maples So Dear
[M]ost of the maples ... will be chopped down as early as next month because of an infestation of Asian long-horned beetles that is plaguing thousands of Worcester's trees.... When a tornado devastated Worcester in 1953, maples were planted as replacement trees. "Norway maples were readily available back then," said Brian Breveleri, the city’s urban forester. "And they were popular because they could weather the cold."
But when Worcester plants new trees this time around, it will vary the type. A tree inventory, completed in 2006, showed that 80 percent of its street trees were maples, which the beetles find irresistible.... "Tree diversity helps prevent pests from gaining a foothold," said Mike Bohne...
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The 10 big energy myths
Myth 1: solar power is too expensive to be of much use; Myth 2: wind power is too unreliable; Myth 3: marine energy is a dead-end; Myth 4: nuclear power is cheaper than other low-carbon sources of electricity...
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Madagascar denies 'land grab' by South Korean conglomerate
Officials from Madagascar are denying they have reached an agreement to turn over half the island nation's arable land to a South Korean corporation for food production, reports Reuters. The controversial deal -- which would have paid Madagascar nothing and turned over 1.3 million hectares to produce corn and palm oil for export at a time when one-third of country's children are malnourished -- was reported last week by the Financial Times.
"Several announcements have been made regarding Daewoo Logistics' project which are erroneous and we would like to set the record straight," Eric Beantanana, of the Economic Development Board of Madagascar, told Reuters on Thursday.... "Furthermore, we are talking about a search for 100,000 hectares ... It is only after this stage that the rest of the process will continue."
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Soil erosion threatens land of 100m Chinese, survey finds
Almost 100 million people in south-west China will lose the land they live on within 35 years if soil erosion continues at its current rate, a nationwide survey has found.
Crops and water supplies are suffering serious damage as earth is washed and blown away across a third of the country, according to the largest-scale study for 60 years.
Harvests in the north-east, known as China's breadbasket, will fall 40 percent within half a century on current trends, even as the 1.3 billion population continues to grow.
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Daewoo to cultivate Madagascar land for free
Daewoo Logistics of South Korea said it expected to pay nothing to farm maize and palm oil in an area of Madagascar half the size of Belgium, increasing concerns about the largest farmland investment of this kind.
The Indian Ocean island will simply gain employment opportunities from Daewoo's 99-year lease of 1.3m hectares, officials at the company said. They emphasised that the aim of the investment was to boost Seoul's food security.... "It is totally undeveloped land which has been left untouched. And we will provide jobs for them by farming it, which is good for Madagascar," said Mr Hong. The 1.3m hectares of leased land is almost half the African country’s current arable land of 2.5m hectares.
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Ecologist: Hope remains for world's oceans, but swift response is needed
Outspoken marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson says humans have caused widespread and difficult-to-imagine damage to the world’s oceans and that the response needs to be of immense proportions. He says it boils down to two simple concepts: Become citizens instead of consumers, and elect real leaders, not facilitators of consumption.... "It's become obvious that [humans] are the cause," Jackson said. "How could we be so out of it? The oceans were out of sight and out of mind and nobody was paying attention. As a marine ecologist, it's embarrassing."
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Got a spare Earth anywhere?
If the world continues to pillage and plunder Earth's natural resources at the rate we are now, by 2030 we will need two planets to support us.
If everyone on Earth consumed the equivalent resources of Canadians, it would take three Earths to meet the demand.
Since the late 1980s, we have been in overshoot -- meaning our ecological footprint has exceeded Earth's biocapacity to sustain our rate of consumption -- by about 30 percent.... Deforestation and land conversions in the tropics, dams, diversions, climate change, pollution and over-fishing are killing species off, the reverberations of which are felt along the food chain.
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Bolivia holds key to electric car future
Lithium carries a great promise. It could help power the fuel efficient electric or petrol-electric hybrid vehicles of the future.
But, as is the case with fossil fuels, it is a limited resource... demand for lithium will outstrip supply in less than 10 years unless new sources are found.
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Is It Time to Kill Off the Flush Toilet?
To flush or not to flush. That was the question that designers and ecologists were asking each other this week as hundreds of people who spend a lot of time thinking about these things convened for the annual World Toilet Summit and Expo in Macau... the flushing loo -- that human innovation that lifted the industrialized world out of its own dirt, cholera and dysentery -- is quickly becoming one of the more egregious instruments of waste in this time of acutely finite resources.
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NOAA takes stock of assessment scientists and comes up short
Now, it turns out that there's a shortage of scientists to tell us that there's a shortage of fish.
A new federal report warns that the nation is facing a critical shortage of stock assessment scientists, the specialists who crunch numbers from various surveys to estimate the abundance of various fish populations.... Miller noted that many important species that live entirely in the Chesapeake have never had stock assessments, including such species as oysters, soft clams, razer clams, horseshoe crabs, catfish and white perch,
"All would be eminently suitable candidates for an assessment, but there simply are not the staff around to do it," he said.
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Drought more menacing, but it gets less mention
Drought? What drought? The rains still haven’t come. Lake Lanier drops ever lower. And Georgia’s water wars with Florida and Alabama slog along.
Yet last fall's doomsday water scenarios have disappeared from newspaper front pages and state officials' lips. Instead, this fall, Georgians are consumed with the financial crisis, the presidential election and gas prices. Meanwhile, the new year promises Year Four of the drought that has fundamentally affected the way North Georgians live.
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Is water the new oil?
...Already, 1bn people do not have enough clean water to drink, and at least 2bn cannot rely on adequate water to drink, clean and eat - let alone have enough left for nature.... The Stockholm International Water Institute talks about 'an acute and devastating humanitarian crisis'; the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, warns of a 'perfect storm'; Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations Secretary General, has raised the spectre of 'water wars'. And, as the population keeps growing and getting richer, and global warming changes the climate, experts are warning that unless something is done, billions more will suffer lack of water - precipitating hunger, disease, migration and ultimately conflict.
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Calif. cuts water deliveries to cities, farms
The state said Thursday it would cut water deliveries to their second lowest level ever, prompting warnings of water rationing for cities and less planting by farmers.
The Department of Water Resources announced it will deliver just 15 percent of the amount that local water agencies throughout California request every year. That marks the second lowest projection since the first State Water Project deliveries were made in 1962.
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Most fish goes into animal feed
A nine-year study by the University of British Columbia has found that 90 percent of small fish caught in the world's oceans every year such as anchovies, sardines and mackerel are processed to make fishmeal and fish oil.
Factory-farmed fish, pigs and poultry are consuming 28 million tonnes of fish a year, or roughly six times the amount of seafood eaten by Americans, according to the study.... The institute's executive director, Dr Ellen Pikitch, said: "It defies reason to drain the ocean of small, wild fishes that could be directly consumed by people in order to produce a lesser quantity of farmed fish."
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Bush approach to restricting fishing meets local resistance
The local fishing community on Guam is joining the Northern Marianas in a battle against a plan in Washington, D.C., to classify the Marianas Trench a national marine monument.... "We're only little guys with little boats," he said of Guam's local fishing community.
All of Guam's small boat fishing operations combined catch 50 tons of fish a year, he said.
A purse seiner -- which local fishermen don't use -- can catch 1,500 tons in just one fishing trip, he said.
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Diversity of trees in Ecuador's Amazon rainforest defies simple explanation
Trees in a hyper-diverse tropical rainforest interact with each other and their environment to create and maintain diversity, researchers report in the Oct. 24 issue of the journal Science....
It is difficult to determine the effects of climate change, habitat fragmentation and species extinctions on life's diversity without a coherent model of how communities are organized; but a unified theory of diversity patterns in ecological communities remains elusive. The most complex biological systems -- such as tropical rainforests -- are the most important testing grounds for theories that attempt to generalize across ecological communities; as they pose the greatest challenge. At Yasuni, in addition to the 600 species of birds and 170 of mammals, there are approximately 1,100 species of trees in the 25 hectare plot -- more than in all of the U.S. and Canada, combined.
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A National Renewable Portfolio Standard? Not Practical
To sum up, we estimate that the states could accommodate 10 percent of the electricity coming from wind (or solar, if the costs were to come down) at any one time. With some attention and adjustment, we find that the electricity system could accommodate 15 percent or even 20 percent....
A national system must also deal with the fact that the best wind resources are in the Great Plains, about 1,000 miles from the Southeast where the electricity is likely to be needed. Policymakers must remain mindful of the difficulty of expanding transmission infrastructure. Community opposition will be widespread, the cost will be high, and the lines themselves will be vulnerable to disruption by storms or terrorists.
Thus, although a 20 percent national RPS might be physically possible with a very large transmission network and large amounts of spinning reserve, the logistical barriers will be high and the costs daunting. Embarking on this path without considering alternative strategies to reach the same ultimate goal would be short-sighted.
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Well-grounded fears of aquifer depletion
But this year, as Palisades' well dropped to its lowest level, as housing and commercial development expanded, as quarry production continued and as natural gas drilling stood on the horizon in Nockamixon, Stanfield said homeowners should start taking notice.
Stanfield, who volunteers as vice chairman of the Bridgeton-Nockamixon-Tinicum Groundwater Management Committee, said in the several years he has monitored water levels, the high school's well is at the highest variation he has seen — with the water level rising and falling.
"It suggests that the aquifer they are drawing from is seriously stressed and there needs to be a review of how to respond to this," he said.
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SOMALIA: Poor rains intensify human suffering and deprivation
The situation in Somalia has deteriorated into an "unfolding humanitarian disaster" with shocking levels of human suffering and deprivation, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned.
"Rates of malnutrition in most of southern and central Somalia are above emergency threshold levels of 15 percent and in many areas greater than 20 percent and increasing," said an analysis prepared by FAO's Food Security Analysis Unit (FSAU).
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Still no answers: A new study doesn't tell us what to do about oysters and the bay
The study's failure to endorse the Asian oyster is bound to disappoint those who think it's the salvation of an industry that has been devastated right along with the creature it depends on. Once so abundant that heaps of oysters broke the surface of local waters, the native oyster has become rare indeed, due to disease, poor water quality and over-fishing.
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Global Hunger Index 2008: hunger situation in 33 countries is 'very serious' to 'grave'
"Almost a billion starving people is a scandal for the world. In contrast to the banks, they themselves are not guilty for their plight. The general rethinking about the role of the state and the international community, brought about by the financial crisis, must be extended to also cover the hunger crisis. The world needs a rescue package to combat global hunger, and we therefore demand that funding for the development of agriculture in developing countries be increased by at least ten billion euros every year and that fairer trading conditions should be created."
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Bleak warning that UK fish face extinction
A hidden catastrophe is unfolding off the coasts of Britain which could leave our seas filled with only algae and jellyfish, a leading conservation organisation warns today. The Marine Conservation Society says severe overfishing is the biggest environmental threat facing Britain and is having a profound effect on marine ecosystems. The warning comes in Silent Seas, a report released as the government prepares its marine bill for parliament.... Simon Brockington, head of conservation at the MCS, said: "There's a moral imperative: we simply shouldn't be living in such a way that drives species to extinction."
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Guzzling the West's Water
What is particularly ironic about livestock-caused stream dewatering is that it usually makes little economic sense. In much of the West, the value of leaving water in the river to sustain native fisheries or to provide for water-based recreation is often vastly greater than that of the beef produced with the same amount of water. Leaving water in the river to support fishing may ultimately be far more beneficial to local economies than using it for irrigation. Yet we regularly sacrifice the fish to produce beef -- a commodity that is already produced more economically and with less environmental impact in other, naturally wetter, parts of the country.
In biology, it can be useful to categorize causative factors as either proximate or ultimate. In the arid West, livestock production is often the ultimate cause of species endangerment, though other factors, often more readily recognized, may be proximate causes. Thus, many dams in the West are proving to be ecological disasters, yet the dams themselves are only proximate causes of deteriorating aquatic ecosystems. Many dams would not have been built but for the demand for water storage for irrigation.
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World Fisheries Waste $50 Billion as Stocks Decline, UN Says
The damage to fish stocks through over-fishing has resulted in larger fleets chasing fewer resources, the report said. The waste amounts to 63 percent of the $80 billion worth of fish caught each year, the UN said in a summary of the report.
Scientists say the world's fisheries may collapse by 2048 if catch levels are maintained. Government subsidies have reduced incentives for change, the UN-World Bank report said. Reducing fleet capacity would increase profitability and allow fish stocks to recover, increasing yields, the report said.
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Pacific fishing collapse predicted
The collapse of commercial fishing in the Pacific has been predicted within five years by Greenpeace.
The comment accompanies the close of the fourth meeting of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commissions Technical and Compliance Committee, reports Radio New Zealand.
Greenpeaces Pacific Oceans campaigner, Lagi Toribau said big fishing companies are depleting the fisheries there in the same way as they have others.
Toribau said the commission, which was set up four years ago, has failed to address the extent of pirate fishing.
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Mexico tourism boom kills coral quicker than climate change
Human waste, like that from Cancun's hotels and night spots, aggravates threats to coral worldwide, such as overzealous fishing, which hurts stocks of fish that eat reef-damaging algae....
Across the Caribbean, the amount of reef surface covered by live coral has fallen about 80 percent in the past 30 years, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network says.
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Topsoil's Limited Turnover: A Crisis In Time
...Records show that topsoil erosion, accelerated by human civilization and conventional agricultural practices, has outpaced long-term soil production. Earth's continents are losing prime agricultural soils even as population growth and increased demand for biofuels claim more from this basic resource.
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Tartar River water banned for using because Armenians poison it
Local residents said the river became very turbid and they found dead bodies of fishes and other river inhabitants.
Armenians began to clean silt layer in Sarsang reservoir with the support of Russian company. The process was shown on Armenian TV channels broadcasted to Nagorno Karabakh.
They shed slops from Sarsang and other reservoirs into Tartar River.
Experts of the Azerbaijan Water Problems Institute found out that 90 per cent of the river water is useless.
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Gas shortage spurs telework in southeast U.S.
Gas shortages in the southeast United States are prompting companies to consider expanding their telework programs so employees can conserve fuel. Other options workers are weighing include greater use of carpools and public transit, along with alternative scheduling arrangements such as four-day work weeks.
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Atlantic tuna return thousands of miles to birthplace to spawn
New research findings reported in Science have critical implications for how bluefin tuna are managed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.... Despite the high level of mixing, the team also observed that over 95 percent of adult bluefin tuna returned to their place of origin in either the Gulf of Mexico or Mediterranean Sea to spawn.... "Rates of homing reported here are extremely high and comparable to Pacific salmon, which are known to return to the streams in which they were initially spawned, with very high frequency," according to co-author Barbara Block from Stanford University.
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Topsoil's Limited Turnover: A Crisis in Time
Records show that topsoil erosion, accelerated by human civilization and conventional agricultural practices, has outpaced long-term soil production. Earth's continents are losing prime agricultural soils even as population growth and increased demand for biofuels claim more from this basic resource.... Top geomorphologist David R. Montgomery of the University of Washington says that "ongoing soil degradation and loss present a global economic crisis that, although less dramatic than climate change or a comet impact, could prove catastrophic nonetheless, given time."
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Report blasts slow progress on Everglades restoration
After eight years, the ambitious effort to restore the Everglades has produced stacks of science and engineering studies, created a sprawling bureaucracy and burned though $7 billion or so of taxpayer money.
But it hasn't restored much of anything.
That's the conclusion of a National Research Council progress report on the Everglades released Monday.
It finds that while the great marsh and its wildlife continue to decline, projects intended to revive the River of Grass have been tied up in red tape, interagency turf battles, budget shortfalls and waffling political support. Construction runs years behind schedule and billions over budget.... "Portions of the ecosystem are close to thresholds that, if they continue to deteriorate, it will be too late."
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Nurseries replenishing B.C.'s forests wither on the vine
This year she grew a crop of 22 million young trees, which she harvested and sent off to market. Logging companies bought those seedlings and so did tree-planting contractors.
With British Columbia's forests in a massive die-off because of a pine beetle infestation, Ms. Dawes's agri-business should be thriving. But it isn't. It is struggling to survive because of a downturn in the forest industry -- and because the federal government no longer recognizes silviculture as farming.... Silviculture operators, who until then had been covered by CAIS, thought they would simply join other farmers in a smooth transition to the new programs.
Then they found out that not only had they lost their status as farmers - but they also had to pay back any funds they'd been given under CAIS, dating back to 2003.
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Iran Sinking as Groundwater Resources Disappear
Iran's insatiable demand for water, which is being drawn out of aquifers far faster than it can be replenished, is causing large chunks of farmland to sink and buildings to crack, according to a new study. Estimates suggest the water levels in Iranian aquifers have declined by an average of nearly 1.5 feet (half a meter) every year over the last 15 years. As the water is removed, soil and rock lose their support, leading to compaction and sinking.
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Long-term Global Food Crisis Looms: Experts Urge Immediate Action
Declining agricultural productivity and continued growing demand have brought the world food situation to a crossroads. Failure to act now through a wholesale reinvestment in agriculture -- including research into improved technologies, infrastructure development, and training and education of agricultural scientists and trainers -- could lead to a long-term crisis that makes the price spikes of 2008 seem a mere blip.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Iranians deplete aquifers, land is sinking
Researchers say increasing demand for groundwater in Iran is depleting that nation's water supplies, resulting in land surface deformations.
An international team of scientists said decades of unrestrained groundwater extraction are linked to land surface deformation on local and regional scales.... "Comparing ground deformation in Iran with other basins around the world revealed that Iran currently hosts some of the fastest sinking valleys and plain aquifers in the world," the scientists said.
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Running dry
The world has a water shortage, not a food shortage: MOST people may drink only two litres of water a day, but they consume about 3,000 if the water that goes into their food is taken into account. The rich gulp down far more, since they tend to eat more meat, which takes far more water to produce than grains. So as the world's population grows and incomes rise, farmers will -- if they use today's methods -- need a great deal more water to keep everyone...
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Global food situation at a crossroads
Declining agricultural productivity and continued growing demand have brought the world food situation to a crossroads. Failure to act now through a wholesale reinvestment in agriculture -- including research into improved technologies, infrastructure development, and training and education of agricultural scientists and trainers -- could lead to a long-term crisis that makes the price spikes of 2008 seem a mere blip.
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Kyrgyzstan Rations Electricity
Trolleybuses stand abandoned, and cars jam intersections because traffic lights do not work. Economic activity is also at a standstill, and people return home to darkness.
Since late August, when the government imposed nationwide electricity rationing, this has been life in Kyrgyzstan. It is the first time since the dire years of the 1990s that Kyrgyzstan has faced widespread outages. Every day power is cut for eight hours in different parts of the country. The government has imposed a rotating rationing scheme to preserve dwindling water supplies from the main regional reservoir in Toktogul. Three hundred kilometers west of Bishkek, Toktogul is the largest water reservoir in Central Asia.
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Water for food: the forgotten crisis
This year, the world and, in particular, developing countries and the poor have been hit by both food and energy crises. As a consequence, prices for many staple foods have risen by up to 100 per cent.
When we examine the causes of the food crisis, growing population, changes in trade patterns, urbanisation, dietary changes, biofuel production, and climate change and regional droughts are all responsible.... The causes of water scarcity are essentially identical to those of the food crisis. There are serious and extremely worrying factors that indicate water supplies are close to exhaustion in some countries. Population growth in the next approximately 40 years will see an increase from 6.5 to up to 9.0 billion. Essentially every calorie of food requires a litre of water to produce it. Therefore, on average we require 2,000-3,000 litres of water per person [per day] to sustain our daily food requirements.
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Hurricane Ike Shuts Largest U.S. Biodiesel Refinery
The nation's largest biodiesel refinery, located on the Houston Ship Channel, will be shut down for the next six to eight weeks because of damage and loss of power caused by Hurricane Ike, company officials say.
The publicly traded owner-operator GreenHunter Energy says damages at its Renewable Fuels Campus were mainly due to floodwater, which crested the 100-year flood plain level, rather than wind damage from Hurricane Ike.
Completed in March, the refinery is capable of producing 105 million gallons of biodiesel a year.
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Can Offshore Drilling Really Make the U.S. Oil Independent?
No one disputes that a lot of oil lies untapped under the rocky floors of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans off the U.S. coasts... The [Minerals Management Service] has estimated that there are around 18 billion barrels in the underwater areas now off-limits to drilling. That's significantly less than in oil fields open for business in the Gulf of Mexico, coastal Alaska and off the coast of southern California, where there are 10.1 billion barrels of known oil reserves as well as an estimated 85.9 billion more... But here's the catch: There is a chance that the MMS has miscalculated the amount of offshore oil, because its estimates are based on 30- to 40-year-old data.
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New study says high grain prices are likely here to stay
An ethanol-fueled spike in grain prices will likely hold, yielding the first sustained increase for corn, wheat and soybean prices in more than three decades, according to new research by two University of Illinois farm economists.
Corn, an ethanol ingredient that has driven the recent price surge, could average $4.60 a bushel in Illinois, nearly double the average $2.42 a bushel from 1973 to 2006, said Darrel Good and Scott Irwin, professors of agriculture and consumer economics.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Seriously: emptying the ocean
Daniel Pauly, director of the UB Fisheries Centre, interview transcript, from 2003: "Generally it takes about 10-15 years from the discovery of a fish population of large fish, for it to be reduced by a factor of 10 and less to a smaller amount."... "[T]hat's why most species of fish have collapsed to less than one or two or three percent of the original biomass in the 50's." ... "So overfishing, in a sense, is subsidized by these enormous prices." ... "If you look at the modern fishing vessel, you will find a level of technical sophistication on deck and its mind boggling. It's like an airplane. It has eco-sound... that tells you where every fish is, where you are, how the grounds look like, extremely detailed.... So if you deploy this technology to catch fish, the fish lose. They invariably lose."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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NASA study illustrates how global peak oil could impact climate
The burning of fossil fuels -- notably coal, oil and gas -- has accounted for about 80 percent of the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since the pre-industrial era. Now, NASA researchers have identified feasible emission scenarios that could keep carbon dioxide below levels that some scientists have called dangerous for climate.... To better understand the possible trajectory of future carbon dioxide, Kharecha and Hansen devised five carbon dioxide emissions scenarios that span the years 1850-2100. Each scenario reflects a different estimate for the global production peak of fossil fuels, the timing of which depends on reserve size, recoverability and technology.
"Even if we assume high-end estimates and unconstrained emissions from conventional oil and gas, we find that these fuels alone are not abundant enough to take carbon dioxide above 450 parts per million," Kharecha said.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Biofuels War: The New Scramble for Africa by Western Big Money Profiteers
African civil society is calling for a moratorium on new biofuels investments in Africa amid concern that that the biofuels revolution will bring more food insecurity, higher food prices and hunger to the continent.
In Tanzania, thousands of farmers growing cereals like corn and rice are already being evicted from fertile land with good access to water, for biofuel sugar cane and jatropha plantations on newly privatized land.
According to the anti-biofuels investment campaigners, whole villages are being cleared or grabbed, but families have been given minimal compensation or opportunities for their loss of land, community and way of life.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Biofuels 200 times more expensive than forest conservation for global warming mitigation
The British government should end subsidies for biofuels and instead use the funds to slow destruction of rainforests and tropical peatlands argues a new report issued by a U.K.-based think tank.... [The study] says that "avoided deforestation" would be a more cost-effective way to address climate change, since land use change generates more emissions than the entire global transport sector and offers ancillary benefits including important ecosystem services.... They find that the biofuel initiative will save 2.6-3 million tons of carbon dioxide per year at a cost of ($1 billion), while a similar investment in preventing deforestation and peatland destruction could result in avoided emissions of 40-200 million tons of CO2 per year or a 50 times greater amount of avoided emissions. The savings would be equivalent to 37 percent of all UK carbon dioxide emissions for 2005.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid's Limits
When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.... The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.
The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads.
"We need an interstate transmission superhighway system," said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Eating rats to beat global food crisis
Rat meat has become such a popular alternative to other dearer meats in Cambodia that its price has increased fourfold.
As inflation pushes the price of beef beyond the reach of the poor, increased demand for rat meat has pushed up rodent prices.... This month, an Indian official said eating rats was a way to beat rising global food prices. Vijay Prakash, the secretary of Bihar's welfare department, said regular rat snacks would also translate into fewer rodents eating precious grain stocks, 50 percent of which are lost in the north-eastern Indian state every year to the creatures.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Urgent Steps Needed To Combat Food Wastage - Report
"The United States and some other developed states throw away nearly a third of their food each year, according to a report that said on Thursday the world was producing more than enough to feed its population... The authors said that in the United States, up to 30 percent of food, worth some $48.3 billion, is thrown away each year.
"That's like leaving the tap running and pouring 40 trillion litres of water into the garbage can -- enough water to meet the household needs of 500 million people," the report said."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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After 5 years of war, Iraqis desperate for water
"At a communal water station in a Baghdad slum, a young boy's skinny arms fly up and down as he uses a bicycle pump to coax water from the dry ground.
His efforts produce a languid stream that will tide over his family -- and the families of the children waiting near him to fill their cooking pots -- until the next day.
This is a daily ritual for millions of Iraqis who lack access to sufficient clean water and proper sewage five years after the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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"Water Mafias" Put Stranglehold on Public Water Supply
"Worldwide corruption driven by mafia-like organizations throughout water industries is forcing the poor to pay more for basic drinking water and sanitation services, according to a new report.
If bribery, organized crime, embezzlement, and other illegal activities continue, consumers and taxpayers will pay the equivalent of U.S. $20 billion dollars over the next decade, says the report, released this week at the World Water Week conference in Stockholm, Sweden."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Everyone knows industry needs oil. Now people are worrying about water, too
Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, estimates that global water consumption is doubling every 20 years, which it calls an "unsustainable" rate of growth. Water, unlike oil, has no substitute. Climate change is altering the patterns of freshwater availability in complex ways that can lead to more frequent and severe droughts.
Untrammelled industrialisation, particularly in poor countries, is contaminating rivers and aquifers. America's generous subsidies for biofuel have increased the harvest of water-intensive crops that are now used for energy as well as food. And heavy subsidies for water in most parts of the world mean it is often grossly underpriced -- and hence squandered.
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52-city Report Examines Use Of Wastewater In Urban Agriculture
As developing countries confront the first global food crisis since the 1970s as well as unprecedented water scarcity, a new 53-city survey conducted by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) indicates that most of those studied (80 percent) are using untreated or partially treated wastewater for agriculture. In over 70 percent of the cities studied, more than half of urban agricultural land is irrigated with wastewater that is either raw or diluted in streams.
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Our Good Earth
"...This year food shortages, caused in part by the diminishing quantity and quality of the world's soil ... have led to riots in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 2030, when today's toddlers have toddlers of their own, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth; to feed them, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, farmers will have to grow almost 30 percent more grain than they do now. Connoisseurs of human fecklessness will appreciate that even as humankind is ratchetting up its demands on soil, we are destroying it faster than ever before. "Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt," says David R. Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington in Seattle."
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Spanish fear day when tap will run dry
"BARCELONA, Spain -- Water woes spiraled to such depths this year that the top regional environment minister here -- a confirmed agnostic -- confessed to climbing the stony shrine of the Virgin of Montserrat for a bit of solace. Winter rains refused to fall, shriveling reserves to severe drought levels and prompting a water shipment from France. Catalonia's go-to guy for the environment, Francesc Baltasar, told local radio that fear made for a quick, if dubious, epiphany at the feet of the Virgin Mary."
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Democrats waver over offshore drilling ban
"Under fire from Republicans, top Democratic politicians in the United States are considering lifting a ban on new offshore oil drilling... Democrats have hitherto said new drilling would do little to relieve consumer pain at the pump, accusing Republicans of misleading the public and being a pawn of big oil companies. Yet signs are emerging that they are easing their opposition to the comprehensive ban."
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Armstrong tops list of city's largest water users
"Every minute, about five gallons of water passed through the sinks, sprinklers, fountain and pool at Lance Armstrong's house in June, making the retired professional cyclist Austin's biggest water-using individual that month.
A total of 222,900 gallons of water was used at Armstrong's home, according to the most recent city records available. That's about what 26 average Austin households use in a month."
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West Africa: Overfishing Linked to Food Crisis, Migration
According to a recent report by the nongovernmental organisation ActionAid, West African seas are being devastated by legal and illegal overfishing, while local fishing industries decline. Moreover, the economic partnership agreements in their currently proposed form only exacerbate this problem.
The overfishing of West African coastal waters, often by large European trawlers and sometimes by "fishing pirates" who trawl without any authorisation, has largely depleted local fish stocks.
This has a direct impact on the rising rate of unemployment and on the ever-increasing flow of West Africans who embark on perilous journeys to Europe, in search of a better life.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Organic Food Has No More Nutritional Value Than Food Grown With Pesticides, Study Shows
New research in the latest issue of the Society of Chemical Industry's (SCI) Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture shows there is no evidence to support the argument that organic food is better than food grown with the use of pesticides and chemicals. Many people pay more than a third more for organic food in the belief that it has more nutritional content than food grown with pesticides and chemicals.... "[T]he study does not support the belief that organically grown foodstuffs generally contain more major and trace elements than conventionally grown foodstuffs."
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Food prices: The people say 'enough!'
Elsewhere in Dakar (Senegal) -- and in nearly a dozen other African countries -- protesters have not been quite as restrained. Angered by sharply rising prices of basic foodstuffs, transport, electricity and other essentials, they have poured into the streets to express their frustrations and demand that their governments act quickly to halt the spiralling cost of living. Street barricades, burning tyres, arson and sometimes deadly confrontations with riot police have been common.... In other countries too, demonstrators often saw the lack of political change as one reason for the widening economic gap between those with access to power and the majority of the poor..... The extent of the protests suggests that ordinary citizens are starting to sense their potential political power and are no longer willing to remain silent. Since 2007, there has been an "awakening of the people's conscience" in Guinea, says Rabiatou Serah Diallo, secretary general of the National Confederation of Workers.
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Shrinking African lake imperils wildlife
"...Once among the largest lakes in the world — at some 9,000 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey — Lake Chad has been decimated over the past four decades by rising temperatures, diminishing rainfall and a growing population that's using more water than ever before. Today, estimated at less than 2 percent of its original size, the lake's surface would barely cover Brooklyn and Manhattan."
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Golf courses try to play through drought
"Amid the current drought, golf courses in the East Bay are some of the hardest-hit water customers. While the local water district has ordered single-family home dwellers to cut water use by 19 percent, so-called irrigators such as golf courses must achieve a 30 percent savings.... The state's 900 golf courses cover about 130,000 acres, employ about 160,000 workers and pump nearly $7 billion into the economy. They are trying to make better use of surface water - and drilling for underground supplies.
But environmentalists say keeping golf courses green shouldn't come at the expense of future water users."
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Virgin forests more efficient at storing carbon
"Untouched natural forests store three times more carbon dioxide than previously estimated and 60 per cent more than plantation forests, a new Australian study of "green carbon" and its role in climate change says.
Green carbon occurs in natural forests, brown carbon is found in industrialized forests or plantations, grey carbon in fossil fuels and blue carbon in oceans.
Australian National University scientists said that the role of untouched forests – and their biomass of green carbon – had been underestimated in the fight against global warming."
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China 'leads the world' in renewable energy
China is the world's leading producer of energy from renewable sources and is on the way to overtaking developed countries in creating clean technologies, according to a report by the Climate Group.... The country already leads the world in terms of installed renewable capacity at 152 gigawatts. In the next year, China will also become the world's leading exporter of wind turbines and it is also highly competitive in solar water heaters, energy efficient home appliances, and rechargeable batteries.
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Ducklings die as a river's flow dries up
"What had been for the last six months a vibrant stream teeming with migrating waterfowl and shorebirds recently became a dry channel where vultures gorged themselves on ducklings that died when the flows dried up.
The discovery prompted calls for an investigation into the deaths of at least 20 cinnamon teal ducklings, 10 mallard ducklings and 20 adult mallards that had sought refuge in a shrinking pool of water in a concrete basin in the city of Industry, about 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.
It also raised questions about the place of nature in an urban water system in which virtually every drop is adjudicated and claimed by someone."
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Farmers ready to cash in on soaring land prices
Farmland prices have risen by 50 per cent over the past year to reach a record high, according to the latest market survey from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
Some farmers are taking the opportunity to sell up and retire, particularly those feeling the squeeze from the rising cost of fuel, fertilisers and energy. Cashing in is a serious option for those who are unable to operate at a profit.
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Markets run out of flour: 'Lists of flour distributors are faulty'
The lists of flourmills dealers provided to the district government by the Food Department is faulty, due to which the magistrates cannot monitor the supply of flour in the market, a district government official told Daily Times on Tuesday.... District Food Controller Arif Shah said that there were some "typographical errors" in the lists, which were being removed. He said that < there was no shortage of flour in markets, adding that stores running out of flour would be provided new stock immediately. "In case any flourmill has provided an incorrect list of dealers, there is a procedure to deal with it under the law," he added.
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Haiti: Mud cakes become staple diet as cost of food soars beyond a family's reach
"At first sight the business resembles a thriving pottery. In a dusty courtyard women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun.
The craftsmanship is rough and the finished products are uneven. But customers do not object. This is Cité Soleil, Haiti's most notorious slum, and these platters are not to hold food. They are food."
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'The Worm' is spreading, and it's hungry
San Miguel and Ouray and Montrose counties are in the process of being invaded -- very slowly -- by Western Spruce Budworms that are sending waves of worry through the populace.
After initially being spotted in Lawson Hill by a concerned homeowner, the worm has reportedly been spotted from Telluride to Ophir to Norwood. It's been called "the most widely distributed and destructive defoliator of coniferous forests in Western North America."
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Finny finis?
Stern trawlers the size of destroyers, purse-seiners that can encircle a dozen nuclear submarines, sonar, spotter planes, GPS and DuPont's nylon monofilament netting become the norm. Equipped with the latest technology, the fishing fleets of the world become armadas facing enemies with brains the size of chickpeas.
By the turn of the millennium, 90 per cent of the world's predator fish - tuna, sharks, swordfish - have been removed from the ocean; leading marine ecologists to project that, because of pollution, climate change and overfishing, all the world's major fisheries will collapse within the next 50 years. The saga ends where it began, in North Atlantic fishing towns, where the locals are reduced to catching slime eels and tourists in search of the quaint get served farmed-in-China tilapia at local seafood shacks.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Fuel cell cars at least 15 years away at best: Study
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are still 15 years away from becoming a viable business for automakers even if they overcome remaining technical hurdles and the U. S. government provides massive subsidies, a government-funded report said last week.
Under a best-case scenario, automakers will only be able to sell about two million electric vehicles powered by fuel cells by 2020, according to the study by the National Research Council. That would mean that less than 1 percent of the vehicles on U.S. roads by that date would be powered by fuel cells.
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Study predicts crop-production costs will jump dramatically in 2009
Costs to get crops in the ground will jump by about a third in 2009, fueled by fertilizer prices expected to surge 82 percent for corn and 117 percent for soybeans, said Gary Schnitkey, an agricultural economist who conducts the annual survey of input costs.... "Roughly 80 percent of the cost of producing nitrogen fertilizer is natural gas, so as natural gas costs have gone up so have the costs of those inputs," he said. "Phosphorus and potassium are mined, and as energy costs increase, mining costs increase."
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Asphalt shortage raises the price of roadwork
Refinery asphalt prices nationally have risen more than 40 percent since March, government statistics show.... According to Simonson, refiners are trimming asphalt production in favor of more profitable products such as gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and kerosene. Some refiners have invested heavily in cokers, he said, to further break up crude oil molecules and wring out still more fuel, leaving little or no asphalt.
"That shift, plus record-high crude prices, explains the huge surge in asphalt prices in the last few months," Simonson said.
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IEA warns non-Opec oil could peak in two years
Dr Birol, who is leading an investigation into the condition of the world's largest oilfields, said that the world was entering a "new oil order".
"Demand growth is no longer coming from the US and Europe but from China, India and the Middle East," he said. "Because their disposable incomes are growing so fast and because of subsidies, high oil prices will not have a major impact on demand growth." This meant that prices would remain extremely high for the foreseeable future and that the fundamental dynamics of the global oil market increasingly were outside of the control of Western countries.
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The coming black plague?
"...governments should start planning for a worst-case scenario, with soaring oil prices disrupting food supplies, just as they plan for other possibilities like nuclear war and bioterrorism... Dale Allen Pfeiffer, author of the recent book Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture, goes even further in his warnings. With global oil production soon sliding into decline, fuel prices might continue to skyrocket until the world's food system collapses, causing starvation, he wrote.
"Growing evidence indicates that world [oil and gas] production will peak around 2010, followed by an irreversible decline. The impact on our agricultural system could be catastrophic," he wrote. "Hunger could become commonplace in every corner of the world, including your own neighborhood."
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Africa's Last and Least
"Soaring prices for food and fuel have pushed more than 130 million poor people across vast swaths of Africa, Asia and Latin America deeper into poverty in the past year, according to the U.N. World Food Program (WFP). But while millions of men and children are also hungrier, women are often the hungriest and skinniest. Aid workers say malnutrition among women is emerging as a hidden consequence of the food crisis."
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Diary: Colorado River drought
"The south-western US is suffering its eighth consecutive year of drought. There are concerns that the Colorado River, which has sustained life in the area for thousands of years, can no longer meet the needs of the tens of millions of people living in major cities such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
The BBC's Matthew Price is travelling along the river to investigate the scale of the problem and is sending a series of diary items from there."
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Greatest value of forests may be sustainable water supply
This new view of forests is evolving, scientists say, as both urban and agricultural demands for water continue to increase, and the role of clean water from forests becomes better understood as an "ecosystem service" of great value. Many factors -- changing climate, wildfires, insect outbreaks, timber harvest, roads, and even urban sprawl -- are influencing water supplies from forests.
Preserving and managing forests may help sustain water supplies and water quality from the nation's headwaters in the future, they conclude, but forest management is unlikely to increase water supplies.
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Olympics suck up China's already scarce water
"...Over-extraction of groundwater and falling water tables are huge problems for China, particularly in the north. Environmental activists warn that the nation is facing a future of water shortages, water pollution and continuing deterioration in water quality. Beijing is one of the world's most water-scarce mega-cities, with a deficit of 324,000 acre-feet annually."
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New studies predict record land grab as demand soars for new sources of food, energy and wood fiber
Escalating global demand for fuel, food and wood fibre will destroy the world's forests, if efforts to address climate change and poverty fail to empower the billion-plus forest-dependent poor, according to two reports released today by the U.S.-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), an international coalition comprising the world's foremost organisations on forest governance and conservation.
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Study: Southeast's cheap access to water at risk
"A new study says global warming and population growth threaten the Southeast's already precarious water supplies by fueling more extreme weather and degrading water quality... Models show that anticipated higher temperatures will generate more volatile weather, with more extreme storms, flooding and erosion ... and contribute to more severe droughts. Adding to the strain is the Southeast's population growth, which has led the nation in recent years."
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More pressure on global fish stocks as scientists warn of underreporting of catches
The implication is that global fish stocks, already widely acknowledged to be under heavy pressure, are in far more in danger than thought. The underreporting particularly threatens the hundreds of millions of poor people around the world who rely on fish for subsistence.
A reconstruction of actual catches in 20 places around the globe showed that fish landings that were not reported were at least as high as the declared catch, and sometimes more than 16 times higher.
"This is underreporting of such magnitude that it boggles the mind," said Professor Daniel Pauly, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
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Peak Metals: Gallium, Indium, Zinc, Copper
The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany' s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.... Dr. Reller says that by 2017 or so there'll be [no gallium] left to use. Indium, another endangered element -- number 49 in the periodic table -- is similar to gallium in many ways, has many of the same uses ... and is being consumed much faster than we are finding it. Dr. Reller gives it about another decade.
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Chicken feed shortage affects poultry industry
ACUTE shortages of poultry feed on the market is increasing nutritional deficiency diseases in chickens, further crippling the poultry industry, which has experienced a sharp decline over the years.
Matabeleland North's Department of Veterinary Services' provincial officer, Dr Polex Moyo said the shortages have resulted in most birds suffering from stress and nutritional deficiencies diseases....
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Secret report: rush to biofuels caused food crisis
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75 percent - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.
The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.
The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3 percent to food-price rises.... Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.
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Scientists set out to measure how we perceive 'naturalness'
Scientists at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) are working towards producing the world's first model that will predict how we perceive naturalness. The results could help make synthetic products so good that they are interpreted by our senses as being fully equivalent to the 'real thing', but with the benefits of reduced environmental impact and increased durability.... Ruth Montgomery of the National Physical Laboratory, said: "Our senses combine to identify natural materials. But what are the key factors, is it colour, gloss, smoothness, temperature?... The focus of the research is wood, fabric and stone, but once the data is combined the aim is to produce a predictive computer model that will work for other materials. If successful the range of applications would be huge. For instance, synthetic mahogany furniture that is indistinguishable from the natural material, but won't rot or be attacked by woodworm or artificial grass so good that they use it on Wimbledon's Centre Court."
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'World Pharmacy' Being Destroyed
A quarter of all our medicine is sourced from it and it hosts a mass of colourful biodiversity. But both the Peruvian Amazon's species and the world's medicine are facing their gravest threat yet.... Just as the rainforest is rich in flora, it also boasts an abundance of other, more lucrative riches.
The race to plunder the forest of fossil fuels, gold and timber for example, means that every day truckloads of trees are slashed and burned with little reforestation. The authorities turn a blind eye to the illegal activities of big business.
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Bread subsidies under threat in drought-hit Syria
The availability of cheap food has been a cornerstone Syrian domestic economic policy.
However, there are growing doubts among ordinary people and analysts as to how much longer the country can remain relatively insulated from the global food crisis which has sparked riots in over 30 countries, including Egypt, where a similar authoritarian socialist government is in place.
The government exerts significant control over food prices through its control of the marketing, import and export of agricultural produce, but the agricultural sector has been partially liberalised, and food prices have risen 20 percent in the last six months, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).
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Map reveals extent of deforestation in tropical countries
A map of the world's tropical forests has revealed that millions of hectares of trees were cut back to make way for crops in recent years.
Created from high-resolution satellite images, the map shows the extent of deforestation in the tropics with unprecedented accuracy.... The map showed that deforestation in Indonesia was largely concentrated in just two regions, and that much of it was peatland. "The peatlands are essentially all carbon, so if you clear it and fire it, an enormous amount of carbon will be emitted into the atmosphere," said Stolle. "Without a precise map, we would not know that level of detail."
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Traffic jam on highway, food crisis imminent
It's a riot-like situation in the iron ore mines area of Kalta, Koira, Tensa and Barsun areas. Acute shortage of essential commodities have compounded the problems of the working class people who are already suffering price hike of essential commodities as a result of high inflation.
With iron ore-laden heavy vehicles from Rajamunda en route Roxy, Kalta, Koira and Barbil getting stranded on NH-215 for the last one week, movement of public buses and other light vehicles on the route has come to a grinding halt. Moreover, [in] the NH-215 near Chuna Ghati area up to a kilometre remains unmotorable. This has reflected on the movement of vehicles and buses carrying essential commodities from Rourkela.
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Indian Wind-Turbine Firm Hits Turbulence
The Indian company -- the world's fifth-largest wind-turbine maker by sales -- earlier this year acknowledged that 65 giant blades on turbines it had sold in the U.S. Midwest were cracking because of the extreme gusts in the region. The company is reinforcing 1,251 blades, almost the total it has sold in the U.S.... Other Suzlon turbines have broken down because of cold weather in the Midwest.... Mr. Tanti has been able to exploit a shortage of turbines from more-established manufacturers like Vestas AS of Denmark, the world's largest wind-turbine producer, and General Electric Co, whose order books are full through 2010. At about $3 million each, Suzlon's turbines sold in the U.S. are priced about 25 percent cheaper than those of major competitors.
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Citing Need for Assessments, U.S. Freezes Solar Energy Project
Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.... "It doesn't make any sense," said Holly Gordon, vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs for Ausra, a solar thermal energy company in Palo Alto, Calif. "The Bureau of Land Management land has some of the best solar resources in the world. This could completely stunt the growth of the industry."
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Djibouti: 'Almost half the population facing food shortages'
A significant percentage of Djibouti's population could face food shortages due to drought, rising prices with declining remittances, and high levels of livestock deaths, an early warning information service has warned.... "Significant food deficits exist in all pastoral areas due to a combination of three consecutive below-average rainy seasons, extremely high prices for staple foods, declining remittances, and high levels of livestock mortality (40-50 percent)," the network noted. "The situation is critical, and pre-famine indicators have been observed."
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Kenya must import three times as much maize as projected
Kenya is first heading for a major shortfall in its staple food product, maize.
Detailed research recently conducted by the Egerton University’s respected Tegemeo Institute of Agricultural Policy and Development shows that Kenya will start running out of maize in August.... Logistically, the most likely supplying country is South Africa, which has a surplus crop. But there is a potential problem here in that its crop is a mix of GMO and non GMO. Kenya is reportedly insisting on the latter, which only comes to the market towards the end of July.
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China's Big Drain
Shijiayao’s main water source is a seep in a notch in the barren mountainside, which drips about a dozen bucketfuls a day—except in summer, when it dries up completely. No one bathes in Shijiayao. Next month, while visitors to Beijing amble along man-made lakes and fountains at the grand Olympic Green and Olympic Forest Park, Shijiayao residents will trek about 12 miles a day for drinking water.... Now the Olympics are exacerbating China’s water problems. To ensure enough potable water for an expected 1.5 million visitors in August, Beijing is tapping 80 billion gallons of so-called backup supply from four reservoirs in neighboring Hebei Province. Yet water levels in these reservoirs are already dangerously low. So to sustain the population boom on the semiarid Beijing plain, China’s water planners are scrambling to build pipelines, canals, and water tunnels farther and farther into the hinterlands.
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U.S. May 'Free Up' More Land for Corn Crops
Signs are growing that the government may allow farmers to plant crops on millions of acres of conservation land, while a chorus of voices is also pleading with Washington to cut requirements for ethanol production.... Senator Grassley ... on Friday urged the Agriculture Department to release tens of thousands of farmers from contracts under which they had promised to set aside huge tracts as natural habitat.
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Sludge used on fields may strip crop of value
Farmers have been warned they could devalue their crops by fertilising them with sewage sludge.
Although partially retracted after being issued, the warning gave a rare glimpse of some unease in the food and drinks business about a practice which has been growing for 10 years.... "We are concerned that following the recent rise in fertiliser prices, some growers may be tempted to apply sewage sludge. The vast majority of our customers do not accept such treatment and a recent parcel of grain sold off water authority land that had been treated with sewage sludge attracted a price discount of £60 per tonne."
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Research institute warns of African land degradation
Lagos, Nigeria - The survival of more than 250 million people living in the dry lands of the developing countries is being threatened by chronic land degradation, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) said in a statement made available to PANA here Thursday.
"Dry lands cover about 41 percent of the earth's surface. The poor people in the dry lands depend mainly on rain-fed agriculture and natural range lands for their survival. Their livelihoods are at risk due to land degradation, which is exacerbated by increasing population growth that is putting considerable pressure on fragile land resources," ICRISAT said.
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Vietnam lifts rice export ban, Manila seals deal
[Lifting the ban] could speed a recent decline in international rice prices from record highs -- prices had nearly trebled this year -- helping to ease food inflation and boosting supplies of the staple in Asia.... "There are signs of improving supplies but we still have a few bullish factors," said one trader.
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Pig manure 'crude oil' no panacea
the NIST team has developed the first detailed chemical analysis revealing what processing is needed to transform pig manure crude oil into fuel for vehicles or heating. Mass production of [T]his type of biofuel could help consume a waste product overflowing at U.S. farms, and possibly enable cutbacks in the nation's petroleum use and imports. But, according to a new NIST paper, pig manure crude will require a lot of refining... [It] contains at least 83 major compounds, including many components that would need to be removed, such as about 15 percent water by volume, sulfur that otherwise could end up as pollution in vehicle exhaust, and lots of char waste containing heavy metals, including iron, zinc, silver, cobalt, chromium, lanthanum, scandium, tungsten and minute amounts of gold and hafnium. Whatever the pigs eat, from dirt to nutritional supplements, ends up in the oil.
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Global Impact Of Urbanization Threatening World's Biodiversity And Natural Resources
"As a species we have lived in wild nature for hundreds of thousands of years, and now suddenly most of us live in cities -- the ultimate escape from nature," says Peter Kareiva, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and co-author of the report. "If we do not learn to build, expand and design our cities with a respect for nature, we will have no nature left anywhere."
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Corn sets all-time high on U.S. crop fears
Corn prices surged to a record high on Monday and looked set to climb further as widespread flooding in a key producing region, the U.S. Midwest, helped to heighten concern about tight supplies, dealers said.
"I think we are definitely going higher. There is no let up either on the demand or supply side...," said analyst Sudakshina Unnikrishnan of Barclays Capital in London.
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Farmers who plant -- or replant -- after June 20 may see yields drop by half
Department of Agriculture reports that corn and soybean growers in several Midwestern states are behind schedule on their planting. A cooler and wetter-than-average spring has left Illinois and Indiana furthest behind on planted corn and soybeans. Several other states are lagging behind their normal planting schedules, but by a lesser margin.
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Recycling boom adds to hazardous life of Cambodian children
Cambodia's growing demand for recyclables -- from bottles and cans to cardboard -- has seen a sharp rise in the number of child scavengers trawling through the capital's waste heaps, many of them press-ganged into what advocates say is one of the world's most hazardous forms of labor.... "They use neither gloves nor shoes, they inhale toxic fumes, eat out of garbage bins," he said, listing ailments he sees every day, from headaches and infected wounds to diarrhea and hacking coughs.
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Report confirms drilling, not earthquake, caused Java mud volcano
A mud volcano which has caused millions of dollars worth of damage was caused by the drilling of a gas exploration well, an international team of scientists has concluded.
The two-year old mud volcano, Lusi, is still spewing huge volumes of mud and has displaced more than 30,000 people.
The most detailed scientific analysis to date disproves the theory that an earthquake that happened two-days before the mud volcano erupted in East Java, Indonesia, was potentially to blame.
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Images reveal 'rapid forest loss'
High-resolution satellite images have revealed the "rapid deforestation" of Papua New Guinea's biodiversity rich rainforests over the past 30 years.
An international team of researchers estimates that the current rate of loss could result in more than half of the nation's tree cover being lost by 2021.... Although it only accounts for less than 0.5 percent of the Earth's land cover, the heavily forested island nation is home to an estimated 6-7 percent of the planet's species.
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High fertilizer prices a growing worry
Urea, a key form of solid nitrogen fertilizer, doubled in price from 2000 to 2007 and then went another 40 percent higher over the past year, according to reports. Potash, another key ingredient in some fertilizers, now costs nearly $600 per ton, while phosphate is nearing $1,000 a ton.... Fuel cannot be blamed for everything that goes up, he added; fertilizer demand is also reaching all-time highs and may bear some responsibility for the costly chaos. Some chemical components are fetching record orders worldwide for everything from farming to mining.
"It's real global," Robinson said. "This is the first year in 30 years that (fertilizer) demand exceeds supply."
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Unnatural roots of the food crisis
The current model of market-driven food production is leaving people hungry.
It has turned food into a commodity subject to all the market failures that create inequities and negative impacts on the environment.... Amazingly, there is very little attention being paid to what fundamentally underpins all of our food systems - biodiversity and the services provided by ecosystems, such as soil, water and resilience to disasters.
We need to attack market failures and change the economic rules of current food production systems.
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Everything You Know About Water Conservation Is Wrong
"...It takes about 155 gallons of water on average to grow a pound of wheat. So the virtual water of this pound of wheat is 155 gallons. For a pound of meat, the virtual water is 5 to 10 times higher. There’s a virtual water count for everything. The virtual water footprint of a cup of coffee is 37 gallons; an apple, 19 gallons; a banana, 27; a slice of bread, 10; a sheet of paper, 3; and a pair of leather shoes, 4,400, according to Waterfootprint.org, a Unesco-run Web site providing a calculator for individual and national water use."
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Peru Guards Its Guano as Demand Soars Again
The worldwide boom in commodities has come to this: Even guano, the bird dung that was the focus of an imperialist scramble on the high seas in the 19th century, is in strong demand once again.... "We are recovering some of the last guano remaining in Peru," said Victor Ropon, 66, a supervisor from Ancash Province whose leathery skin reflects his years working on the guano islands since he was 17.
"There might be 10 years of supplies left, or perhaps 20, and then it will be completely exhausted," said Mr. Ropon, referring to fears that the seabird population could be poised to fall sharply in the years ahead.
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Get used to high food costs, water shortages
"Shocked by rising food prices? Get used to it -- and be ready for water shortages, too, says a sweeping new scientific report rounding up likely effects of climate change on the United States' land, water and farms over the next half-century."
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Oil crisis triggers fevered scramble for the world's seabed
"A fevered scramble for control of the world's seabed is going on - mostly in secret - at a little known office of the United Nations in New York. Bemused officials are watching with a mixture of awe and suspicion as Britain and France stake out legal claims to oil and mineral wealth as far as 350 nautical miles around each of their scattered islands across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans... Not to be left out, Australia and New Zealand are carving up the Antarctic seas."
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Midwest's message: Hands off our lakes
"Piece by piece, a 5,500-mile wall around the Great Lakes is going up. You can't see it, but construction is progressing nicely, along with an implied neon sign that flashes, "Hands off—it's our water." The legal pilings for a 1,000-mile segment of the wall are scheduled to be sunk Tuesday when Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle finalizes his state's approval of the so-called Great Lakes Compact, a multistate agreement designed to protect and restrict access to nearly 20 percent of the world's supply of fresh water, contained in the five Great Lakes."
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Poor soil lowers world's production of food
"...Soils around the world are deteriorating with about one-fifth of the world's cropland considered degraded in some manner. The poor quality has cut production by about one-sixth, according to a World Resources Institute study. Some scientists consider it a slow-motion disaster."
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Drought turning futures to dust
"APALACHICOLA BAY, FLA. — Longtime oysterman Keith Millender sees every shower taken or car washed in metropolitan Atlanta as a small threat to his family, which has harvested seafood from northwest Florida's Apalachicola Bay for generations. The Apalachicola River — which carries water more than 300 miles from Georgia's Lake Lanier into the bay, providing the delicate balance of freshwater and saltwater oysters need to thrive — is running dry."
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Shell 'selling suicide' by preferring tar sands to wind
Shell was accused yesterday of "selling suicide on the forecourt" by pressing ahead with tar sands operations in Canada and continuing to flare off excess gas in Nigeria while pulling out of renewable schemes such as the London Array - the world's largest offshore wind scheme.
The accusation that Shell was irresponsibly adding to climate change was made by an unnamed shareholder at its annual meeting in The Hague after Shell chief executive Jeroen van der Veer insisted the company was doing all it could to meet rising demands for energy while reducing CO2 emissions. Shell would listen to all stakeholders but he warned "ultimately it will not be possible to meet fully everyone's expectations".
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Oil hits record near $130 as supply fears grow
Crude oil prices scaled a new peak near $130 a barrel on Tuesday amid deepening worries over tight global stockpiles and signals from OPEC that no additional supplies are forthcoming to ease the crunch. Billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens said Tuesday he expected oil to hit $150 a barrel this year. The prediction came on the same day two investment banks raised their 2008 crude price forecasts and two weeks after Goldman Sachs said a barrel could fetch $200 by 2010.
"There's a feeling that some of these forecasts of $150 oil might be right," said Peter Beutel, president of Cameron Hanover. "So why not buy it now, rather than later?"
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Famine Looms as Wars Rend Horn of Africa
"...Somalia -- and much of the volatile Horn of Africa, for that matter -- was about the last place on earth that needed a food crisis. Even before commodity prices started shooting up around the globe, civil war, displacement and imperiled aid operations had pushed many people here to the brink of famine.
But now with food costs spiraling out of reach and the livestock that people live off of dropping dead in the sand, villagers across this sun-blasted landscape say hundreds of people are dying of hunger and thirst.
This is what happens, economists say, when the global food crisis meets local chaos.
"We're really in the perfect storm," said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia economist and top United Nations adviser, who recently visited neighboring Kenya."
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It's time to put a lid on bottled water
the manufacturing process is a factor in global warming and depletion of energy resources; it takes close to 17 million barrels of oil to produce the 30 billion water bottles that U.S. citizens go through every year. Or, as the National Geographic website illustrates it: "Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That's about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle." It also takes more water to produce a bottle than the bottle itself will hold. Canadians consume more than two-billion litres of bottled water a year, and globally we consume about 190 billion litres a year. Unfortunately, most of those bottles -- more than 85 per cent, in fact -- get tossed into the trash rather than the recycling bin.
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Fears for Amazon rainforest as Brazil's environment minister resigns
Silva said her decision was the result of the "difficulties" she was facing in "pursuing the federal environmental agenda". She said her efforts to protect the environment had faced "growing resistance … [from] important sectors of the government and society".... Sergio Leitao, the director of public policy for Greenpeace in Brazil, said Silva had taken her decision because of growing pressure from within the government to relax laws outlawing bank loans to those who destroyed the rainforest.
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Supermarket prices too high for low-income earners
Corporate Area supermarket shopping has gotten more expensive for minimum wage and middle income earners as price increases on basic food items continue to wreak havoc on the salaries of employed persons. A survey of five supermarkets by the Sunday Observer last week showed a staggering variation in prices on basic food items, and the only competition appeared to be which supermarket is the most expensive.
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Oil over USD 126, new peak for 5th straight day
Oil prices leapt to a new peak of more than $126 a barrel on Friday, hitting a record for the fifth straight session, in a market given an additional spur by tight supplies of diesel.
U.S. crude for June delivery rose $1.87 to $125.56 by 1335 GMT, off a record high of $126.20 a barrel. London Brent crude rose $2.81 to $125.65 per barrel.
"I'm not particularly surprised by the speed of the rise in crude. There are many market bulls hoping for prices to rise heading into the summer," said Tetsu Emori, fund manager at Astmax Co Ltd in Tokyo.
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"Dishonest, irresponsible": Shell lambasted for pulling out of world's biggest windfarm
Oil giant drops plan days after it reports £4bn profits. Shell was accused last night of being greedy and irresponsible as it came under ferocious attack from politicians and environmentalists for its decision to drop a commitment to the biggest offshore wind farm in the world.... "Mere days after reporting first-quarter profits of £4bn, Shell has shown its true colours in what can only be described as a PR disaster for the company, and further proof that its media-friendly "greenspeak" is both dishonest and irresponsible."
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Emptying the Breadbasket
"...Across America, turmoil in the world wheat markets has sent prices of bread, pasta, noodles, pizza, pastry and bagels skittering upward, bringing protests from consumers... U.S. farmers are expected to plant about 64 million acres of wheat this year, down from a high of 88 million in 1981. In Kansas, wheat acreage has declined by a third since the mid-1980s, and nationwide, there is now less wheat in grain bins than at any time since World War II -- only about enough to supply the world for four days. This occurs as developing countries with some of the poorest populations are rapidly increasing their wheat imports."
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Shops ration sales of rice as US buyers panic
The global food crisis reached the United States yesterday as big retailers began to ration sales of rice in response to bulk purchases by customers alarmed by rocketing prices of staples. Wal-Mart's cash and carry division, Sam's Club, announced it would sell a maximum of four bags of rice per person to prevent supplies from running short. Its decision followed sporadic caps placed on purchases of rice and flour by some store managers at a rival bulk chain, Costco, in parts of California. The world price of rice has risen 68 percent since the start of 2008, but in some US shops the price has doubled in weeks.... Looting and riots in Haiti left at least six dead and forced the resignation of the prime minister this month, leaving the hemisphere's poorest country tense and edgy. In Guyana an 80 percent rise in the price of rice and 50 percent in the cost of chicken triggered protests and a strike by sugarcane workers. The government promised to issue seeds and urged people to cultivate idle land. Surinam set up an emergency cabinet committee to seek ways to dampen food prices.
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The future of dirt
"THE EARTH'S UNCERTAIN oil reserves and dwindling freshwater supply may get all the attention, but modern society is also overtaxing the ground itself. At the same time that a growing population and the newfound appetites of the global middle class are straining our food supply, governments all over the world are also pushing for more ethanol-generating energy crops. To support all that production on a limited amount of arable land, scientists and farmers have long focused on technical improvements such as plant breeding, bioengineering, and creating new fertilizers and pesticides. But some are now asking a different question: What if we could create better dirt?
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Turkey Plans to Sell Rivers and Lakes to Corporations
The water privatization fever is hitting Turkey, just a year before the country will host the World Water Forum. In March 2009 the Turkish government will host the fifth World Water Forum against a backdrop of what is probably the most sweeping water privatisation programme in the world. As well as privatizing water services, the government plans to sell off rivers and lakes.... There are private water supply contracts in Arpacay and Corlu, as well as widespread outsourcing and subcontracting of the water supply across the country. In the city of Antalya, French water giant Suez pulled-out six years into a 10-year contract after the municipality rejected their demand for another price increase. The prices had already risen 130 percent and the company had failed to invest what was promised.
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Bangladesh stops poor from collecting rotten rice
"The dumping site has been cordoned, and the relevant authorities have been asked not to dump rotten rice at unrestricted spots anymore," a security official said. Hundreds of poor people thronged the dumping site as the Food Department started ditching some 500 tonnes of damaged rice on Friday. Nearly half of Bangladesh's 140 million people live on an income less than a dollar per day and their plight has worsened since rice and other food prices started rising this year. "The rice is still not too bad, we are sure this will not harm us," said Manjula Begum, a mother of three children, after collecting a bowl of rice.
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Brown Scientists Say Biodiversity Is Crucial to Ecosystem Productivity
In the first experiment involving a natural environment, scientists at Brown University have shown that richer plant diversity significantly enhances an ecosystem's productivity.... the results confirmed tests charting how biodiversity affects aboveground plant productivity in artificial ecosystems.... the greater the number of plant species, the more productive the ecosystem.
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Chicago rice hits record high above $25
U.S. rice futures struck a new lifetime peak above $25 in Asian trading on Thursday, as worries about possible supply shortages continued to plague the world's second-biggest food grain crop.
Chicago Board of Trade July rough rice futures surged to a record high of $25.010 per hundredweight on worries over scarce global supplies of the grain. CBOT rice is up about 80 percent so far this year. The July contract surpassed the previous record of $24.85 touched in Chicago on Wednesday, where it later closed at $24.82.
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Roots of Asia's rice crisis
"BOHOL, PHILIPPINES...For decades, governments have been encouraging a boom in services and skyscrapers, but not the capacity to grow more rice. Financing in agriculture has stagnated, and fewer farmers are expected to produce more rice for exploding populations. That neglect is one of the central causes of what some analysts call the "perfect storm" – including rising global oil prices, drought in Australia, and inclement weather – behind the rice crisis."
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A vicious circle of misery
"People are stunned. And it's not just the poor and hungry buyers. It's the small merchants themselves," says Trevor Rowe, a World Food Program spokesperson for Latin America.
"They're bearing the brunt of the consumers' complaints, and they have a hard time justifying the high costs. It's a brutal situation for everyone. In the rural part of the country the calorie intake was already low. Now people are plunged into chronic hunger."
El Salvador is not alone. Throughout the world, the working poor, and even the middle class, have been pushed into poverty by soaring food costs. International aid organizations and charities are faced with a crisis that is unprecedented in the last half century.
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Melting mountains a 'time bomb' for water shortages
"VIENNA - Glaciers and mountain snow are melting earlier in the year than usual, meaning the water has already gone when millions of people need it during the summer when rainfall is lower, scientists warned on Monday.
"This is just a time bomb," said hydrologist Carmen de Jong at a meeting of geoscientists in Vienna.
Those areas most at risk from a lack of water for drinking and agriculture include parts of the Middle East, southern Africa, the United States, South America and the Mediterranean.
Rising global temperatures mean the melt water is occurring earlier and faster in the year...."
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The coming hunger
"...This week, food riots paralyzed Haiti, with angry marchers outside the president's palace shouting "We are hungry!" Five people were killed in the chaos...Rice is the staple food of 4 billion people. But the prices for it, along with corn, wheat and other basics, has surged by 40 per cent to 80 per cent in the last three years and caused panicked uprisings in some of the poorest countries on Earth, from Cameroon to Bolivia. The situation has deteriorated so swiftly that some experts predict the effects of a global food crisis are going to bite more quickly than climate change.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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The Big Picture: Resource Collapse
We (the human we) have pushed the limits of many of the resources our civilization has come to depend upon. Oil is the most talked-about example, but from topsoil to fisheries, water to wheat, many of the resources underpinning life and society as we know it face significant threat. In many cases, this threat comes from simple over-consumption; in others, it comes from ecosystem damage (often, but not always, made worse by over-consumption).
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Food prices rise beyond means of poorest in Africa
"It has been called a "perfect storm" -- a combination of apparently unrelated events that have come together to trigger soaring food prices. Millions of people, particularly in developing countries, are affected by rises that have caused riots and many deaths.
Increased energy prices, competition between biofuels and food, rising demand from economic growth in emerging countries and the effects of sudden climatic shocks, such as drought and floods, have combined to cause skyrocketing prices in some of the world's poorest countries, such as Ethiopia and Burkina Faso.
Peter Smerdon, Africa spokesman for the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), told The Times: "The people hit hardest by this combination of factors are those living on the razor's edge of poverty. There is not one single country in Africa not negatively affected. Indeed, most countries in the world are affected."
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Drought ignites Spain's 'water war'
"There is a common saying in Spain that during a drought, the trees chase after the dogs. Now it is ringing true as the country struggles to deal with the worst drought since the Forties: reservoirs stand at 46 per cent of capacity and rainfall over the past 18 months has been 40 per cent below average. But months before the scorching summer sun threatens to reduce supplies to a trickle, a bitter political battle is raging over how to manage Spain's scarcest resource -- water. Catalonia, in the parched north east, has been worst affected, with reservoirs standing at just a fifth of capacity.
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Shell CEO: Easy-To-Produce Oil to Peak
Van der Veer said while depletion of maturing conventional resources would certainly play a key role in peak production, lack of access to remaining large reserves, such as in Saudi Arabia, was also a central component in his forecast.
Remaining resources, such as gas trapped in difficult-to-tap reservoirs or oil sands and shales, will require increasingly costly investments per barrel to produce.
"It's becoming technologically expensive, capital intensive and lead times are growing longer," van der Veer said at an energy supply scenario seminar at the Center for Strategic International Studies.
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Land Once Preserved Now Being Farmed
"Since the mid-1980s, the U.S. government, in an attempt to reduce the environmental fallout from large-scale farming, has been paying farmers to set aside less-than-ideal land for conservation. The results have been overwhelmingly positive: Soil erosion has been reduced; chemical and fertilizer runoff has eased; habitats for game birds and endangered species have been created and enlarged. The pushback to climate change has been equally noteworthy: In 2007, the lands trapped 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, making the Conservation Reserve Program the most effective government-funded defense against greenhouse gases on private lands....But dark clouds are forming on the protected fields. Historically, farmers have been eager to participate in the program, and many still are. But as prices for crops have soared, a growing number of farmers have opted to put conservation land back into production. The trend is expected to accelerate -- to the grave concern of many observers who caution that years of steady environmental progress could be halted, or even reversed, as buffers and habitats are converted into farmland...to feed the global demand for biofuels.
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Gwynne Dyer: World countdown to crop catastrophe
In Thailand, farmers are sleeping in their fields after reports that thieves are stealing their rice, now worth $600 a tonne. Four people have died in Egypt in clashes over subsidised flour that was being sold for profit on the black market. There have been food riots in Morocco, Senegal and Cameroon.... Last year it became clear that the era of cheap food was over. Food costs worldwide rose by 23 per cent between 2006 and 2007. This year, what is becoming clear is the impact of this change on ordinary people.
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Tensions rise as world faces short rations
"Food prices are soaring, a wealthier Asia is demanding better food and farmers can't keep up. In short, the world faces a food crisis and in some places it is already boiling over.
Around the globe, people are protesting and governments are responding with often counterproductive controls on prices and exports -- a new politics of scarcity in which ensuring food supplies is becoming a major challenge for the 21st century...Global food prices, based on United Nations records, rose 35 percent in the year to the end of January, markedly accelerating an upturn that began, gently at first, in 2002. Since then, prices have risen 65 percent."
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American West Heating Nearly Twice As Fast As Rest Of World
"The American West is heating up more rapidly than the rest of the world, according to a new analysis of the most recent federal government temperature figures. The news is especially bad for some of the nation’s fastest growing cities, which receive water from the drought-stricken Colorado River. The average temperature rise in the Southwest’s largest river basin was more than double the average global increase, likely spelling even more parched conditions."
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How Food Shortages Provoke Economic Nationalism
"Half the world's population depends on rice, but stocks are at their lowest level since the 1970s. Securing adequate food supplies is policy priority number one for many developing countries. This political dimension means that there is plenty of mileage in the current food price boom.... The link between food shortages and civil unrest is well known. In the year 2000 around 15m tonnes of America's maize crop was turned into ethanol, in 2007 that quantity was almost 85m tonnes, output that would normally be earmarked for food consumption. The rise in global maize prices caused 'tortilla riots' in Mexico in January last year. There have also been food riots in Morocco, Uzbekistan, Yemen and West Africa."
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Water will be source of war unless world acts now, warns minister
"The world faces a future of "water wars", unless action is taken to prevent international water shortages and sanitation issues escalating into conflicts, according to Gareth Thomas, the International Development minister.
The minister's warning came as a coalition of 27 international charities marked World Water Day, by writing to Gordon Brown demanding action to give fresh water to 1.1 billion people with poor supplies. "If we do not act, the reality is that water supplies may become the subject of international conflict in the years ahead," said Mr Thomas. "We need to invest now to prevent us having to pay that price in the future."
His department warned that two-thirds of the world's population will live in water-stressed countries by 2025. The stark prediction comes after the Prime Minister said in his national security strategy that pressure on water was one of the factors that could help countries "tip into instability, state failure or conflict".
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Investors warm to water as shortages mount
" LONDON (Reuters) - As liquidity is drained from credit and money markets and pours into oil and gold, another asset class that could offer long-term returns to the discerning investor is water. Water shortages are on the rise -- stemming from soaring demand, growing populations, rising living standards and changing diets. A lack of supply is compounded by pollution and climate change. Investors are mobilizing funds to buy the assets that control water and improve supplies, especially in developing countries such as China where urban populations are booming, further tightening supply."
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Drought eases, water wars persist
"It's raining again in the Southeast. Much of the drought-parched region has been deluged recently by winter downpours, including weekend storms that battered the downtown business district and a swath of north Georgia. The drought has not ended, but it has eased across most of the region, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor and the National Weather Service.... Now comes a tougher challenge: resolving new and long-standing disputes over water that some experts say could hamper the region's emergence as an economic and population powerhouse. In a part of the nation where water shortages have not traditionally been an issue, it's difficult to tell whether even a historic drought has made a lasting difference, some scholars say. "The Southeast has not yet come to grips with the fact that it has a water problem, that it needs to plan for its water usage, that it can't take for granted that all the water it needs will always be there," says Robin Craig, a law professor and water expert at Florida State University's College of Law.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Near-empty dam causes supply disruptions
The dam was yesterday alarmingly three-quarters empty, with the two streams running dry. Water from the Waimanu River was being pumped into the dam yesterday to make up for the shortfall.
Mr Yanuyanurua said as a result of the dry spell Fiji had been experiencing over the past few days, the water level had dropped dangerously.... Interim Local Government Lekh Ram Vayeshnoi said the water department should explain why this had happened.
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The energy-water nexus: deja-vu all over again?
"With US policymakers struggling to contemplate a future where oil pipelines sputter and water wells come up empty, panellists at the recently concluded American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston urged a rethink of the connection between these two crucial resources....Energy and water are closely linked. We use a lot of water to produce energy, especially fossil fuel energy. And we use a lot of energy to produce water -- for food, to treat water, to capture and treat wastewater", says [Peter] Gleick, [director of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California]. "Energy constraints are beginning to affect water policy, and water policy is beginning to affect our energy choices. And yet, almost never do we integrate these two policies."...Now, the 2009 budget contains US$8 million earmarked to help fund a Department of the Interior census of domestic water supplies -- the first in 30 years.
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Food crisis will take hold before climate change, warns chief scientist
Food security and the rapid rise in food prices make up the "elephant in the room" that politicians must face up to quickly, according to the government's new chief scientific adviser.
In his first major speech since taking over, Professor John Beddington said the global rush to grow biofuels was compounding the problem, and cutting down rainforest to produce biofuel crops was "profoundly stupid".
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Twin shocks of finance and resources facing global economy
The global economy is facing twin shocks. Natural resource markets are delivering a supply shock of 1970s dimensions, while the financial system is delivering a shock comparable to the bank and thrift crises of the 1988-1993 period. The magnitude of each shock is very different. The financial markets require a recapitalisation of the banking system, with estimates ranging from $300bn to $1,000bn.... The broad story is of depletion. Most of the easily obtainable resource deposits have already been exploited and most usable agricultural land is already in production. Natural resource discoveries, where they continue to occur, tend to be of a lower quality and are more costly to extract. Meanwhile, the dwindling supply of unutilised land faces competing demands from biodiversity, biofuels and food production.
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Life after the oil crash
The grab-your-gun-and-head-for-the-hills scenario goes something like this: In the next year or so, world oil production will peak and then promptly plummet, forced down by sinking reserves. While supply crashes, demand will grow. Virtually overnight, fuel will become so dear that farm tractors will go idle, people will go hungry and homes will go cold. Financial markets will collapse and social chaos will follow.... These "doomers," as they're called among the peaknik community, congregate online at DieOff.org, AnthroPik.com and dozens of other apocalyptic sites dedicated to discussing when the sky will fall and what to do afterward.
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Yemen Sleepwalks Into Water Nightmare
"BEIT HUJAIRA - Black-clad women trudge across a stony plateau in the Yemeni highlands to haul water in yellow plastic cans from wells that will soon dry up... These women are at the sharp end of what Yemen's water and environment minister describes as a collapse of national water resources so severe it cannot be reversed, only delayed at best...Yemen relies on groundwater, which nature cannot recharge fast enough to keep pace with a population of 22.4 million expanding by more than 3 percent a year.
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Collier county wants right to withdraw more aquifer water; district reluctant
"The county wants more fresh water because it is less expensive to treat than brackish water and can be treated with existing water plant capacity, delaying the need to build new plants, county Water Director Paul Mattausch said.... More than half of the county's water supply comes from alternative water supplies, either highly treated reclaimed water from the county's sewage treatment plants or brackish water from deeper underground."
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Olympics highlight Beijing water woes
"BEIJING --
When 16,000 athletes and officials show up this summer, they will be able to turn the taps and get drinkable water - something few Beijing residents ever have enjoyed.
But to keep those taps flowing for the Olympics, the city is draining surrounding regions, depriving poor farmers of water. Though the Chinese capital's filthy air makes headlines, water may be its most desperate environmental challenge. Explosive growth combined with a persistent drought mean the city of 17 million people is fast running out of water."
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Embattled ag undersecretary makes no apologies for timber policies
"He overhauled federal forest policy to cut more trees -- and became a lightning rod for environmentalists who say he is intent on logging every tree in his reach. After nearly seven years in office, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey still has a long to-do list. Near the top: Persuade a federal judge to keep him out of jail ... A Montana judge, accusing Rey of deliberately skirting the law so the Forest Service can keep fighting wildfires with a flame retardant that kills fish, has threatened to put him behind bars."
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Food riots and the UN World Food Program
"WFP officials say the extraordinary increases in the global price of basic foods were caused by a "perfect storm" of factors: a rise in demand for animal feed from increasingly prosperous populations in India and China, the use of more land and agricultural produce for biofuels, and climate change.... Food riots have broken out in Morocco, Yemen, Mexico, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Pakistan has reintroduced rationing for the first time in two decades. Russia has frozen the price of milk, bread, eggs and cooking oil for six months. Thailand is also planning a freeze on food staples. After protests around Indonesia, Jakarta has increased public food subsidies. India has banned the export of rice except the high-quality basmati variety."
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Global shortage of metals looming
"Peak oil has lots of press, but what about peak copper? Peak zinc? Peak gold? Sounds preposterous, but maybe it's not so far-fetched. Nearly every commodity is experiencing some supply issues, for a host of reasons. Add it all up, and it means potential supply shortages in the future. Demand may slacken this year, but in the next 10 years today's high commodity prices may actually look like a bargain."
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A Very Alarming Picture in Energy Sector Peak Oil Trends
"If you think that at the moment the world is consuming 30-plus billion barrels a year of oil and is finding seven or eight billion barrels a year, and this state of affairs has been going on now for 20 or more years... It's obviously unsustainable." ... Dr. Buckee says the cost of a barrel of oil could reach as high as $200 by the third or fourth quarters of this year, and that prices would have to get that high before it would have any particular impact on demand.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Palm at new peak on record soy oil
"Malaysian palm oil futures jumped more than 2 per cent to a new peak for the sixth straight session on Thursday on tight global vegetable oil supplies and crude oil's record over $101....
Palm oil has climbed nearly 21 per cent this year, driven by increased Chinese and European demand, a flood of funds into commodity markets and Jakarta's plans to hike export taxes for palm oil."
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Oil jumps above $100 on refinery outage
"NEW YORK - Oil futures shot higher Tuesday, closing above $100 for the first time as investors bet that crude prices will keep climbing despite evidence of plentiful supplies and falling demand. At the pump, gas prices rose further above $3 a gallon. There was no single driver behind oil's sharp price jump; investors seized on an explosion at a 67,000 barrel per day refinery in Texas, the falling dollar, the possibility that OPEC may cut production next month, the threat of new violence in Nigeria and continuing tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela. The fact that there was no overriding reason for such a price spike could be a bad omen for consumers already bearing the burdens of high heating costs and falling real estate values."
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'SA's water could run out by 2025'
"The government is now being warned about a looming water crisis for South Africa in the same way that it was warned a decade ago about the present energy crisis, one of the country's top environmental organisations says. The warning from World Wide Fund for Nature - South Africa (WWF-SA) is that 98 percent of available water resources are already fully utilised and the country could run out of water by 2025. "This doesn't mean the taps will run dry, but that water-intensive industries won't be able to continue working as before and there may be water rationing," chief executive of WWF-SA Morne du Plessis told a media briefing at the Waterfront on Wednesday."
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Human Activities Triggering "Global Soil Change"
"Earth's climate and biodiversity aren't the only things being dramatically affected by humans—the world's soils are also shifting beneath our feet, a new report says....This new era will be defined by the pervasiveness of human environmental impacts, including changes to Earth's soils and surface geology...Earth's soils already show a reduced capacity to support biodiversity and agricultural production."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Two billion face water famine as Himalayan glaciers melt
"New Delhi: Two billion people face acute water shortage this century as Himalayan glaciers melt due to global warming. [Sayed I. Hasnain of the Centre for Policy Research] said the little work that had been done predicted that there would be a 20-30 percent increase in the water flow of the Ganges in the next four decades as the glaciers feeding the river melted, followed by a severe water shortage."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Unsustainable Soil Use Can Cause Civilizations to Collapse
"Earth is running out of soil. At least that's the conclusion of a new study supporting the long-held belief that current farming practices are causing soil to erode more quickly than new soil can be produced."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Commodities continue to rack up double digit gains
"In five of the last six years commodity prices have posted double-digit increases.
And the indications are that the index, which tracks price trends in 32 of Canada's major exports, has started the year with another increase, aided by gold, oil, potash, sulphur and wheat prices, all of which reached record highs so far this month."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Is this the end of cheap food?
"Walton ... forecasts two further years of similar increases, at least. All the indicators, the prices of every food staple, are on the up - wheat doubled in price at one point last year. 'It's something the industry has expected and is thus, hopefully, a manageable cycle,' he says. 'No hunger riots. But we have enjoyed food prosperity for a long time, and we're seeing the end of that.'
Others offer an even more bleak assessment. Jacques Diouf, head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, spoke recently of a 'very serious crisis' brought about by the rise in food prices and the rise in the oil price. Various global economic bodies are forecasting rises of between 10 per cent and 50 per cent over the next decade."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Oil shale rises again in Western Colorado
Chevron officials look at the size of tomorrow's market. Six billion people live on Earth, and there might be 9 billion by the middle of the century. "We're probably going to need every molecule of energy going forward that we can get to meet the needs of that growing population," Johnson said.
That's what brings Chevron back to Colorado's notoriously difficult oil-shale deposits. "The easy oil, we pretty much have used up," he said.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Christophe de Margerie, the boss of Total, thinks that the world's oil production may be nearing its peak
"Mr de Margerie is careful to point out that he is not predicting "peak oil" in a geological sense. His definition of peak oil is "when supply cannot meet demand". He believes that the fuel that the world needs to keep its cars and factories running may well be out there, somewhere. It is just getting harder and harder to extract, for technical as well as political reasons. For one thing, he points out, the output of existing fields is declining by 5m-6m b/d every year. That means that oil firms have to find lots of new fields just to keep production at today's levels. Moreover, the sorts of fields that Western oil firms are starting to develop, in very deep water, or of nearly solid, tar-like oil, are ever more technically challenging. There is not enough skilled labour and fancy equipment in the world, he believes, to ramp up production as quickly as people hope."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Peak Gold?
Production from the world's biggest producer, South Africa, has sunk to levels not seen since the 1930s, he said, and despite a long-standing bull run for the price of gold, a finite supply of the precious metal means not enough is being produced to meet demand.
"Demand is driving this inexorably," Mr. Norman said. "People talk about peak oil, but peak gold should also be a feature of discussion in 2008."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Oil futures rise to $100 a barrel
"Crude oil prices briefly soared to $100 a barrel Wednesday for the first time, reaching that milestone amid an unshakeable view that global demand for oil and petroleum products will outstrip supplies."
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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LA Reservoirs Closed After Carcinogen Is Found
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power plans to drain 600 million gallons from the reservoirs, the Elysian and the Silver Lake, early next year, said a water department spokesman, Joseph Ramallo. The reservoirs will be out of use for three to four months amid drought conditions.
High levels of the carcinogen bromate were found in early October by a commercial customer who ran a laboratory test, officials said. The utility confirmed the finding, immediately removed the reservoirs from service and notified the Department of Public Health.
Officials emphasized that the chemical is dangerous only after long-term consumption.
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Tip: Bumming out? Don't forget that there's
also the
Recovery Scenario!
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Urbanisation causing wetland depletion
"Experts found that the pollution of wetland ecosystems in the State was considerably high in Vembanad-Kol backwater system following various types of pollution in the upstream areas of the Pampa, Achenkovil and Periyar rivers. Also, salinity intrusion into rivers due to low water level in the summer months makes it unfit for drinking and other uses like irrigation. Heavy metal concentration was observed during the pre-monsoon months. The high metal concentration, observed in Kochi harbour area during the pre-monsoon season, was also attributed to the intrusion of high saline waters and precipitation of particulate matter."
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Cheap Oil is So Yesterday. Time to Start Writing Expensive Oil into Our Plans?
"Competition for scarce resources will drive up the future price of raw materials: The building blocks of progress -- fossil fuel energy, metals, land - are more abundant and cheaper now than they will be in the future. Resource nationalism means that certain strategic materials may not be available for import -- at any price -- in the not-too-distant future. We should reconsider the future value of energy, raw materials, farmland and water."
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Manila: Study sees lack of clean water by 2025
"The Philippines' water resources are fast deteriorating with rapid urbanization, with only about 33 percent of river systems still suitable as a supply source and up to 58 percent of groundwater now contaminated, a new Asian Development Bank (ADB) research shows."
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